Her first thought was: "He's going too in a few hours--I needn't see him
again before he leaves..." At that moment the possibility of having to
look in Darrow's face and hear him speak seemed to her more unendurable
than anything else she could imagine. Then, on the next wave of feeling,
came the desire to confront him at once and wring from him she knew
not what: avowal, denial, justification, anything that should open some
channel of escape to the flood of her pent-up anguish.

She had told Owen she was tired, and this seemed a sufficient reason for
remaining upstairs when the motor came to the door and Miss Painter and
Sophy Viner were borne off in it; sufficient also for sending word to
Madame de Chantelle that she would not come down till after luncheon.
Having despatched her maid with this message, she lay down on her sofa
and stared before her into darkness...

She had been unhappy before, and the vision of old miseries flocked
like hungry ghosts about her fresh pain: she recalled her youthful
disappointment, the failure of her marriage, the wasted years that
followed; but those were negative sorrows, denials and postponements of
life. She seemed in no way related to their shadowy victim, she who
was stretched on this fiery rack of the irreparable. She had suffered
before--yes, but lucidly, reflectively, elegiacally: now she was
suffering as a hurt animal must, blindly, furiously, with the single
fierce animal longing that the awful pain should stop...

She heard her maid knock, and she hid her face and made no answer. The
knocking continued, and the discipline of habit at length made her lift
her head, compose her face and hold out her hand to the note the woman
brought her. It was a word from Darrow--"May I see you?"--and she said
at once, in a voice that sounded thin and empty: "Ask Mr. Darrow to come
up."

The maid enquired if she wished to have her hair smoothed first, and
she answered that it didn't matter; but when the door had closed, the
instinct of pride drew her to her feet and she looked at herself in the
glass above the mantelpiece and passed her hands over her hair. Her eyes
were burning and her face looked tired and thinner; otherwise she could
see no change in her appearance, and she wondered that at such a moment
her body should seem as unrelated to the self that writhed within her as
if it had been a statue or a picture.

The maid reopened the door to show in Darrow, and he paused a moment