t; then he said slowly: "What you imagine's mere
madness. She was at the theatre with me."

"With you?" He saw a tremor pass through her, but she controlled it
instantly and faced him straight and motionless as a wounded creature in
the moment before it feels its wound. "Why should you both have made a
mystery of that?"

"I've told you the idea was not mine." He cast about. "She may have been
afraid that Owen----"

"But that was not a reason for her asking you to tell me that you hardly
knew her--that you hadn't even seen her for years." She broke off and
the blood rose to her face and forehead. "Even if SHE had other reasons,
there could be only one reason for your obeying her----" Silence fell
between them, a silence in which the room seemed to become suddenly
resonant with voices. Darrow's gaze wandered to the window and he
noticed that the gale of two days before had nearly stripped the tops
of the lime-trees in the court. Anna had moved away and was resting her
elbows against the mantel-piece, her head in her hands. As she stood
there he took in with a new intensity of vision little details of her
appearance that his eyes had often cherished: the branching blue veins
in the backs of her hands, the warm shadow that her hair cast on
her ear, and the colour of the hair itself, dull black with a tawny
under-surface, like the wings of certain birds. He felt it to be useless
to speak.

After a while she lifted her head and said: "I shall not see her again
before she goes."

He made no answer, and turning to him she added: "That is why she's
going, I suppose? Because she loves you and won't give you up?"

Darrow waited. The paltriness of conventional denial was so apparent to
him that even if it could have delayed discovery he could no longer have
resorted to it. Under all his other fears was the dread of dishonouring
the hour.

"She HAS given me up," he said at last.

XXVIII

When he had gone out of the room Anna stood where he had left her. "I
must believe him! I must believe him!" she said.

A moment before, at the moment when she had lifted her arms to his neck,
she had been wrapped in a sense of complete security. All the spirits
of doubt had been exorcised, and her love was once more the clear
habitation in which every thought and feeling could move in blissful
freedom. And then, as she raised her face to Darrow's and met his eyes,
she had seemed to look into the very ruins of his soul. That was