us was
Maggie.

Maggie! His mind slowly wheeled round to her. He rose from his chair
and began clumsily to parade the room. He walked up and down the study
as though with closed eyes, his large body bumping against corners of
tables and chairs. Maggie! He looked back, as of late he had often
done, to those days in his cousin's house in London. What had happened
to the Maggie whom he had known there?

He saw her again, so quiet, so ready to listen and learn, so modest,
and yet with a humour and sense of appreciation that had promised well
for the future. A child--an ignorant, charming, uneducated child, that
is what she had seemed. He admitted now that his heart, always too soft
and too gentle perhaps, had been touched beyond wisdom. She had seemed
to need just the protection and advice that he had been fitted to give
her. Then, as though in the darkness of the night, the change had been
made; from the moment of entering into Skeaton there had been a new
Maggie. He could not tell himself, because he was not a man clever at
psychology, in what the change consisted. Had he been pressed he would
have said perhaps that he had known the old Maggie intimately, that
nothing that she could say or do astonished him, but that this new
Maggie was altogether a stranger. Time had not altered that; with the
passing months he had known her less and less. Why, at their first
meeting long ago in Katherine's house he had known her better than he
knew her now. He traced the steps of their history in Skeaton; she had
eluded him always, never allowing him to hold her for more than a
moment, vanishing and appearing again, fantastic, in some strange
lighted distance, hurting him and disappointing him ... He stopped in
his walk, bewildered. He saw, with a sudden flash, that she had never
appeared so fascinating to him as when she had been strangest. He saw
it now at the moment when she seemed more darkly strange, more sinister
and dangerous than ever before.

He realised, too, at the same sharp moment the conflict in which he was
engaged. On the one side was all his life, his sloth and ease and
comfort, his religion, his good name, his easy intercourse with his
fellow-men, Grace, intellectual laziness, acceptance of things as they
most easily are, Skeaton, regular meals, good drainage, moral, physical
and spiritual, a good funeral and a favourable obituary in The Skeaton
Times. On the other hand unrest, ill-health, separation from Grace, an