er brought up in a stuffy house with
windows tightly closed, in full vision of a high road, imagine her
promised the freedom of the road at a future time; imagine her
liberated, at last, rushing into the new life and finding that, after
all, the walls of the house were still about her, and about her now for
ever.

Her one reserve during the early months of the year at Seddon had been
her letters to Francis Breton. His letters to her had been a series of
self-revelation; he had restrained himself in so far as appealing to her
simply on the score of their relationship and his enmity to the head of
the house. She had replied revealing her sympathy, hinting at rebellion
on her own side and feeling, after the writing of every letter, a hatred
of her own deceit, a curiously heightened sense of affection for Roddy,
above all a conviction that impulses were, of their own agency, working
to some climax that she could not, or would not, control.

The foreign blood in her, the English blood in him, baffled their
advances toward one another. Everything that Rachel did now seemed to
Roddy so close to melodrama that it was best to use silence for his
weapon. All Roddy's actions were to Rachel further illustrations of
Beaminster muddle and second-rate personality.

Had Roddy called out of Rachel the great depth of passion and reality
that she inherited from her mother her own love of him would have solved
everything--but that he could not call from her, nor ever would.

For Rachel, she saw in him now a possibility of perpetual infidelity,
and at every suspicion of it her disgust both at herself and him grew
because that possibility did not move her more.

They came up to London at the beginning of May and hid, very
successfully from the world, the widening breach.

To Rachel, it was sheer terror to discover the thrill that the adjacence
of Elliston Square to Saxton Square gave her. In this one
self-revelation there was enough to present her with night after night
of sleepless misery. She visited the Duchess and found that her presence
was continually demanded. Every visit was a battle.

"Show me how you are treating him, whether he cares for you. Have you
found him out? Tell me everything----"

"I will tell you nothing. I will come here day after day and you shall
gather nothing from me. I have escaped you."

"Indeed you have not escaped me. My power over you is only now
beginning----"

No word between them but the most ci