ess drawing-room with its eternal slip-covers and "bowed"
shutters.

In this inhospitable obscurity Anna had sat alone for close upon two
hours. Both obscurity and solitude were acceptable to her, and impatient
as she was to hear the result of the errand on which she had despatched
her hostess, she desired still more to be alone. During her long
meditation in a white-swathed chair before the muffled hearth she had
been able for the first time to clear a way through the darkness and
confusion of her thoughts. The way did not go far, and her attempt to
trace it was as weak and spasmodic as a convalescent's first efforts
to pick up the thread of living. She seemed to herself like some one
struggling to rise from a long sickness of which it would have been so
much easier to die. At Givre she had fallen into a kind of torpor, a
deadness of soul traversed by wild flashes of pain; but whether she
suffered or whether she was numb, she seemed equally remote from her
real living and doing self.

It was only the discovery--that very morning--of Owen's unannounced
departure for Paris that had caught her out of her dream and forced her
back to action. The dread of what this flight might imply, and of the
consequences that might result from it, had roused her to the sense of
her responsibility, and from the moment when she had resolved to follow
her step-son, and had made her rapid preparations for pursuit, her mind
had begun to work again, feverishly, fitfully, but still with something
of its normal order. In the train she had been too agitated, too
preoccupied with what might next await her, to give her thoughts to
anything but the turning over of dread alternatives; but Miss Painter's
imperviousness had steadied her, and while she waited for the sound of
the latch-key she resolutely returned upon herself.

With respect to her outward course she could at least tell herself that
she had held to her purpose. She had, as people said, "kept up" during
the twenty-four hours preceding George Darrow's departure; had gone
with a calm face about her usual business, and even contrived not too
obviously to avoid him. Then, the next day before dawn, from behind
the closed shutters where she had kept for half the night her dry-eyed
vigil, she had heard him drive off to the train which brought its
passengers to Paris in time for the Calais express.

The fact of his taking that train, of his travelling so straight and
far away from her, gave