ed a crime and once denied it, I would
deny it with my last breath, and no torture should drag it out of me!"

And she thought: "I am punished. This is my punishment for letting
myself be engaged while Mrs. Maldon was dying."

Often she had dismissed as childish the notion that she was to blame
for accepting Louis just when she did. But now it returned full of
power and overwhelmed her. And like a whipped child she remembered
Mrs. Maldon's warning: "My nephew is not to be trusted. The woman
who married him would suffer horribly." And she was the woman who had
married him. It seemed to her that the warnings of the dying must of
necessity prove to be valid.

Some mysterious phenomenon on the window-blind at her right hand
attracted her attention, and she looked round, half startled. It was
the dawn, furtive and inexorable. She had watched dawns, and she had
watched them in that very bedroom. Only on the previous morning the
dawn had met her smarting and wakeful eyes, and she had imagined that
no dawn could be more profoundly sad!... And a little earlier still
she had been desolating herself for hours because Louis was going to
be careless about his investments, because he was unreliable and she
would have to watch ceaselessly over his folly. She had imagined then
that no greater catastrophe could overtake her than some material
result of his folly!... What a trivial apprehension! What a child she
had been!

In the excitement and alarm of his accident she had honestly forgotten
her suspicions of him. That disconcerted her.

She rose from the chair, stiff. The stove, with its steady faint
roar of imperfectly consumed gas, had thoroughly heated the room. In
careful silence she put the tea-things together. Then she ventured to
glance at Louis. He was asleep. He had been restlessly asleep for a
long time. She eyed him bitterly in his bandages. Only last night
she had been tormented by that fear that his face might be marked
for life. Again the trivial! What did it matter whether his face was
marked for life or not?...

It did not occur to her to attempt to realize how intense must have
been the spiritual tribulation which had forced him to confess. She
knew that he was not dying, that he was in no danger whatever, and
she was perfectly indifferent to the genuineness of his own conviction
that he was dying. She simply thought: "He had to go through all that.
If he fancied he was dying, can I help it?" ... Then she looked