t was his instinct, not his eyes that knew her.

She had not come forward as the door opened; she had swerved and stepped
back rather, gripping her skirts tighter round her as she cowered.
Sleeked by the rain, supple, sinuous, and shivering, she cowered like a
beaten bitch.

Yet she faced him. Shrinking from him, cowering like a bitch, backing to
the edge of the porch where the rain beat her, she faced him for a
moment.

Then she crept to him cowering; and as she cowered, her hands, as if in
helplessness and fear, let fall the skirts they had gathered from the
rain. Her eyes, as she came, gazed strangely at him; eyes that cowered,
bitchlike, imploring, agonized, desirous.

She crept to the very threshold.

"Let me in," she said. "You will, won't you?"

"I can't," he whispered. "You know that as well as I do."

Her eyes looked up sideways from their cowering. They were surprised,
bewildered, incredulous.

"But I'm soaked through. I'm wet to me skin."

She was on the threshold. She had her hand to the door.

He could see her leaning forward a little, ready to fling her body upon
the door if he tried, brutally, to shut it in her face. It was as if
she actually thought that he would try.

He knew then that he was not going to shut the door.

"Come in out of the rain. And for God's sake don't make a noise."

"I'm not making a noise. I didn't even ring the bell."

He drew back before her as she came in, creeping softly in a pitiful
submission. Though the passage was lighted from the street through the
wide-open door, she went as if feeling her way along it, with a hand on
the wall.

Ransome turned. He had no desire to look at her.

He struck a match and lit the gas, raised it to the full flame, and
then, though he had no desire to look at her, he looked. He stared
rather.

Outside in the half darkness he had known her, as if she stirred in him
some sense, subtler or grosser than mere sight. Now, in the full light
of the hanging lamp, he did not know her. He might have passed her in
the street a score of times without recognizing this woman who had been
his wife; though he would have stared at her, as indeed he would have
been bound to stare. It was not only that her body was different, that
her figure was taller, slenderer, and more sinuous than he had ever seen
it, or that her face was different, fined down to the last expression of
its beauty, changed, physically, with a difference that seemed to him
a