Lady Walderhurst had discovered the place during her honeymoon, and had
loved it fondly ever since. The avenue leading to it was her favourite
walk; a certain seat under a tree on the island her favourite
resting-place.

"It is so still there," she had said to the Osborns. "No one ever goes
there but myself. When I have crossed the little old bridge and sit down
among the greenness with my book or work, I feel as if there was no
world at all. There is no sound but the rustle of the leaves and the
splash of the moor-hens who come to swim about. They don't seem to be
afraid of me, neither do the thrushes and robins. They know I shall only
sit still and watch them. Sometimes they come quite near."

She used, in fact, to take her letter-writing and sewing to the sweet,
secluded place and spend hours of pure, restful bliss. It seemed to her
that her life became more lovely day by day.

[Illustration: Hester Osborn]

Hester did not like the pool. She thought it too lonely and silent. She
preferred her beflowered boudoir or the sunny garden. Sometimes in these
days she feared to follow her own thoughts. She was being pushed--pushed
towards the edge of her precipice, and it was only the working of Nature
that she should lose her breath and snatch at strange things to stay
herself. Between herself and her husband a sort of silence had grown.
There were subjects of which they never spoke, and yet each knew that
the other's mind was given up to thought of them day and night. There
were black midnight hours when Hester, lying awake in her bed, knew that
Alec lay awake in his also. She had heard him many a time turn over with
a caught breath and a smothered curse. She did not ask herself what he
was thinking of. She knew. She knew because she was thinking of the same
things herself. Of big, fresh, kind Emily Walderhurst lost in her dreams
of exultant happiness which never ceased to be amazed and grateful to
prayerfulness; of the broad lands and great, comfortable houses; of all
it implied to be the Marquis of Walderhurst or his son; of the long,
sickening voyage back to India; of the hopeless muddle of life in an
ill-kept bungalow; of wretched native servants, at once servile and
stubborn and given to lies and thefts. More than once she was forced to
turn on her face that she might smother her frenzied sobs in her pillow.

It was on such a night--she had awakened from her sleep to notice such
stillness in Osborn's adjoining ro