elusive and never-to-be-satisfied pursuit, scandal and possible loss of
religion, unhappiness ... At least it was to his credit that he
realised the conflict; it is even further to his credit that he grasped
and admitted the hopelessness of it. He knew which way he would go;
even now he was tired with the thought of the struggle; he sank into
his shabby chair with a sigh of weariness; his hand stretched out
instinctively for an easy volume. But oh, Maggie! how strange and
fascinating at that moment she appeared to him, with her odd silences,
her flashes of startled surprise, her sense of being half the day in
another world, her kindness to him and then her sudden terror of him,
her ignorance and then the conviction that she gave suddenly to him
that she knew more than he would ever know, above all, the way that
some dark spirit deep down in him supported her wild rebellions, her
irreverences, her irreligion, her scorn of tradition. Oh! she was a
witch! Grace's word for her was right, but not Grace's sense of it. The
more Grace was shocked the more tempting to him the witch became. It
had seemed to him, that day in Katherine's drawing-room, so slight a
thing when she had said that she did not love him, he had no doubt but
that he could change that. How could a child, so raw and ignorant,
resist such a man? And yet she had resisted. That resistance had been
at the root of the trouble. Whichever way things went now, he was a
defeated man.

The door opened and Grace came in. Looking at her he realised that she
would never understand the struggle through which he had been
timorously wading, and saw that she was further away from him than she
had ever been before. He blamed her too. She had had no right to refuse
that man to Maggie. Had she allowed Maggie to see him none of this
might have occurred. The man was a forger and would, had he lived, have
gone to prison, but there would not then have been the same open
scandal. No, he blamed Grace. It might be that their old absolutely
confident intimacy would never be renewed. He felt cold and lonely. He
bent forward, putting some coal on the fire, breaking it up into a
cheerful blaze. Then he looked up at her, and his heart was touched.
She looked to-day an old woman. Her hair was untidy and her face was
dull grey in colour. Her eyes moved restlessly round the room,
wandering from picture to picture, from the mantelpiece to the chairs,
from the chairs to the book-shelves, as tho