t of Effie, and of what she owed to Effie, had been the
fundamental reason for her delays and hesitations when she and Darrow
had come together again in England. Her own feeling was so clear that
but for that scruple she would have put her hand in his at once. But
till she had seen him again she had never considered the possibility
of re-marriage, and when it suddenly confronted her it seemed, for the
moment, to disorganize the life she had planned for herself and her
child. She had not spoken of this to Darrow because it appeared to her a
subject to be debated within her own conscience. The question, then, was
not as to his fitness to become the guide and guardian of her child;
nor did she fear that her love for him would deprive Effie of the least
fraction of her tenderness, since she did not think of love as something
measured and exhaustible but as a treasure perpetually renewed. What she
questioned was her right to introduce into her life any interests
and duties which might rob Effie of a part of her time, or lessen the
closeness of their daily intercourse.

She had decided this question as it was inevitable that she should; but
now another was before her. Assuredly, at her age, there was no possible
reason why she should cloister herself to bring up her daughter; but
there was every reason for not marrying a man in whom her own faith was
not complete...

XXXIV

When she woke the next morning she felt a great lightness of heart. She
recalled her last awakening at Givre, three days before, when it had
seemed as though all her life had gone down in darkness. Now Darrow
was once more under the same roof with her, and once more his nearness
sufficed to make the looming horror drop away. She could almost have
smiled at her scruples of the night before: as she looked back on them
they seemed to belong to the old ignorant timorous time when she had
feared to look life in the face, and had been blind to the mysteries and
contradictions of the human heart because her own had not been revealed
to her. Darrow had said: "You were made to feel everything"; and to feel
was surely better than to judge.

When she came downstairs he was already in the oak-room with Effie and
Madame de Chantelle, and the sense of reassurance which his presence
gave her was merged in the relief of not being able to speak of what was
between them. But there it was, inevitably, and whenever they looked at
each other they saw it. In her dre