, with its strong chin and close-bound hair, like that of an
amazon in a frieze.

It was their first moment alone since she had left him, the afternoon
before, at her mother-in-law's door; and after a few words about the
injured child their talk inevitably reverted to Owen.

Anna spoke with a smile of her "scene" with Madame de Chantelle, who
belonged, poor dear, to a generation when "scenes" (in the ladylike
and lachrymal sense of the term) were the tribute which sensibility was
expected to pay to the unusual. Their conversation had been, in every
detail, so exactly what Anna had foreseen that it had clearly not made
much impression on her; but she was eager to know the result of Darrow's
encounter with her mother-in-law.

"She told me she'd sent for you: she always 'sends for' people in
emergencies. That again, I suppose, is de l'epoque. And failing Adelaide
Painter, who can't get here till this afternoon, there was no one but
poor you to turn to."

She put it all lightly, with a lightness that seemed to his tight-strung
nerves slightly, undefinably over-done. But he was so aware of his own
tension that he wondered, the next moment, whether anything would ever
again seem to him quite usual and insignificant and in the common order
of things.

As they hastened on through the drizzle in which the storm of the night
was weeping itself out, Anna drew close under his umbrella, and at the
pressure of her arm against his he recalled his walk up the Dover
pier with Sophy Viner. The memory gave him a startled vision of the
inevitable occasions of contact, confidence, familiarity, which his
future relationship to the girl would entail, and the countless chances
of betrayal that every one of them involved.

"Do tell me just what you said," he heard Anna pleading; and with sudden
resolution he affirmed: "I quite understand your mother-in-law's feeling
as she does."

The words, when uttered, seemed a good deal less significant than they
had sounded to his inner ear; and Anna replied without surprise: "Of
course. It's inevitable that she should. But we shall bring her round
in time." Under the dripping dome she raised her face to his. "Don't you
remember what you said the day before yesterday? 'Together we can't
fail to pull it off for him!' I've told Owen that, so you're pledged and
there's no going back."

The day before yesterday! Was it possible that, no longer ago, life
had seemed a sufficiently simple business for a