onally evil temper was to transform it into an infernal
one. The night had been a bad one for Rosy. Such floods of homesick
longing had overpowered her that she had not been able to sleep. She had
risen feeling shaky and hysterical and her nervousness had been added to
by her fear that Nigel might observe her and make comment. Of course
she told herself it was natural that he should not wish her to appear at
Stornham Court looking a pale, pink-nosed little fright. Her efforts
to be cheerful had indeed been somewhat touching, but they had met with
small encouragement.

She thought the green-clothed country lovely as the train sped through
it, and a lump rose in her small throat because she knew she might have
been so happy if she had not been so frightened and miserable. The thing
which had been dawning upon her took clearer, more awful form. Incidents
she had tried to explain and excuse to herself, upon all sorts of
futile, simple grounds, began to loom up before her in something like
their actual proportions. She had heard of men who had changed their
manner towards girls after they had married them, but she did not know
they had begun to change so soon. This was so early in the honeymoon to
be sitting in a railway carriage, in a corner remote from that occupied
by a bridegroom, who read his paper in what was obviously intentional,
resentful solitude. Emily Soame's father, she remembered it against her
will, had been obliged to get a divorce for Emily after her two years
of wretched married life. But Alfred Soames had been quite nice for six
months at least. It seemed as if all this must be a dream, one of those
nightmare things, in which you suddenly find yourself married to
someone you cannot bear, and you don't know how it happened, because you
yourself have had nothing to do with the matter. She felt that presently
she must waken with a start and find herself breathing fast, and panting
out, half laughing, half crying, "Oh, I am so glad it's not true! I am
so glad it's not true!"

But this was true, and there was Nigel. And she was in a new, unexplored
world. Her little trembling hands clutched each other. The happy, light
girlish days full of ease and friendliness and decency seemed gone
forever. It was not Rosalie Vanderpoel who pressed her colourless face
against the glass of the window, looking out at the flying trees; it was
the wife of Nigel Anstruthers, and suddenly, by some hideous magic, she
had been snat