y walked
very slowly, as if full of thoughts and weary with the day. Bragdon's
head was high, his glance fell far off across the fields, his mind
intent on something within, his brow slightly contracted as in stern
resolve. He was pale, and he seemed to his wife older, much older than
she remembered. He was a man, not the careless boy she had married so
many, many years ago, and her heart tightened anew with intolerable
pain.... His glance fell to the expectant face of his companion, and
both smiled with profound intimacy as at a meeting where words are
needless.... Milly's hand grasped the prickly vines of the hedge, and
she held herself still until they had passed. No, it made no difference
to her now what they thought or did. She knew.

She fled. She heard her name faintly through the din of rushing blood in
her ears, but she stumbled across the field out into the lane, towards
the sea. There followed the most atrocious hour Milly was ever to know
in her life, while she wandered aimlessly to and fro on the lonely
beach. Her marriage was over--that thought returned like a mournful
chant in the storm of blind feeling. Latterly she had come to take her
husband as a matter of course, as a part of the married life of a woman.
Though she had said to Nettie Gilbert, "I'm as much in love with Jack as
when I married him," and believed it, she hadn't been. But now that
another had dared to take her husband from her, if only for a few days
or hours, she was outraged. She persistently focussed her whole anguish
upon this foreign creature with her vampire mouth, though she might know
in the depth of her heart that her quarrel was not with the Russian or
any woman, but with fate.... She kept repeating to herself,--"He doesn't
love me any longer. He loves her--_her_!... He will be hers now--for a
time. They are all like that,--artists. It's _bourgeois_ to love one
woman always." So Womanhood from the beginning of time seemed outraged
in her person.

Had she not joyfully "given up everything for him," as all women did for
the men they loved? (Even her worldly prospects when she married the
penniless artist began to seem to her brighter than they really had
been.) Had she not, at any rate, given _herself_ to him, first, and
always, and only? And borne him a child in pain and danger? What more
could woman do? He was her debtor for eternity, as every man was to the
woman who gave herself to him. And four years had barely passed before