ays sought her help in difficult hours; and now,
in the most difficult of all, she was the one being to whom he could
not turn. Between them, henceforth, there would always be the wall of an
insurmountable silence...She strained her aching thoughts to guess how
the truth had come to him. Had he seen the girl, and had she told him?
Instinctively, Anna rejected this conjecture. But what need was there of
assuming an explicit statement, when every breath they had drawn for the
last weeks had been charged with the immanent secret? As she looked back
over the days since Darrow's first arrival at Givre she perceived
that at no time had any one deliberately spoken, or anything been
accidentally disclosed. The truth had come to light by the force of its
irresistible pressure; and the perception gave her a startled sense of
hidden powers, of a chaos of attractions and repulsions far beneath
the ordered surfaces of intercourse. She looked back with melancholy
derision on her old conception of life, as a kind of well-lit and well
policed suburb to dark places one need never know about. Here they were,
these dark places, in her own bosom, and henceforth she would always
have to traverse them to reach the beings she loved best!

She was still sitting beside the untouched tea-table when she heard
Darrow's voice in the hall. She started up, saying to herself: "I must
tell him that Owen knows..." but when the door opened and she saw his
face, still lit by the same smile of boyish triumph, she felt anew the
uselessness of speaking...Had he ever supposed that Owen would not know?
Probably, from the height of his greater experience, he had seen long
since that all that happened was inevitable; and the thought of it, at
any rate, was clearly not weighing on him now.

He was already dressed for the evening, and as he came toward her he
said: "The Ambassador's booked for an official dinner and I'm free after
all. Where shall we dine?"

Anna had pictured herself sitting alone all the evening with her
wretched thoughts, and the fact of having to put them out of her mind
for the next few hours gave her an immediate sensation of relief.
Already her pulses were dancing to the tune of Darrow's, and as they
smiled at each other she thought: "Nothing can ever change the fact that
I belong to him."

"Where shall we dine?" he repeated gaily, and she named a well-known
restaurant for which she had once heard him express a preference. But as
she did