ted. Michael Fane appeared like the tempter and
Guy like his easy prey. Distortions of the most ordinary, the most
trifling incidents piled themselves upon her imagination; and that visit
to London assumed a ghastly and impenetrable mysteriousness.

Guy vainly tried to laugh away her fancies; faster and still faster the
evil cohorts swept up against her, almost as tangible as bats flapping
into her face.

"Don't talk so loud," said Guy, crossly. "Do remember where we are."

Then she reproached him with having brought her here. She felt that he
deserved to pay the penalty, and defiantly she was talking louder and
louder until Guy, with feverish strokes, urged the canoe down-stream
towards home.

"For God's sake, keep quiet!" he begged. "What has happened to you?"

That he should be frightened by her violence made her more angry. She
threw at him the wildest accusations, how that through him she had
ceased to believe in God, to care for her family, for her honor, for
him, for life itself.

"Pauline, will you keep quiet? Are you mad to behave like this?"

He drove the canoe into a thorn-bush, so that it should not upset, and
he seized her wrist so roughly that she thought she screamed. There was
something splendid in that scream being able to disquiet the night, and
in an elation of woe she screamed again.

"Do you know what you're doing?" he demanded.

She found herself asking Guy if she were screaming, and when she knew
that at last she could hurt him, she screamed more loudly.

"You used to laugh at me when I said I might go mad," she cried. "Now do
you like it? Do you like it?"

"Pauline, I beg you to keep quiet. Pauline, think of your people. Will
you promise to keep quiet if I take you out of this thorn-bush?"

He began to laugh not very mirthfully, and that he could laugh
infuriated her so much that she was silent with rage, while Guy
disentangled the canoe from the thorn-bush and more swiftly than before
urged it towards home.

When they reached the grassy bank that divided the Abbey stream from the
mill-pool, she would not get out of the canoe to walk to the other side.

"I cannot cross that pool," she said. "Guy, don't ask me to. I've been
afraid of it always. If we cross it to-night, I shall drown myself."

He tried to argue with her. He pleaded with her, he railed at her, and
finally he laughed at her, until she got out and watched him launch the
canoe on the farther side and beckon through the