in the darkness and felt the night breath of the flowers in
the garden, she was thinking of all the murderers she had ever heard of.
She was reflecting that some of them had been quite respectable people,
and that all of them must have lived through a period in which they
gradually changed from respectable people to persons in whose brains a
thought had worked which once they would have believed impossible to
them, which they might have scouted the idea of their giving room to.
She was sure the change must come about slowly. At first it would seem
too mad and ridiculous, a sort of angry joke. Then the angry joke would
return again and again, until at last they let it stay and did not laugh
at it, but thought it over. Such things always happened because some one
wanted, or did not want, something very much, something it drove them
mad to think of being forced to live without, or with. Men who hated a
woman and could not rid themselves of her, who hated the sight of her
face, her eyes, her hair, the sound of her voice and step, and were
rendered insane by her nearness and the thought that they never could be
free from any of these things, had before now, commonplace or
comparatively agreeable men, by degrees reached the point where a knife
or a shot or a heavy blow seemed not only possible but inevitable.
People who had been ill-treated, people who had faced horrors through
want and desire, had reached the moment in which they took by force what
Fate would not grant them. Her brain so whirled that she wondered if she
was not a little delirious as she sat in the stillness thinking such
strange things.

For weeks she had been living under a strain so intense that her
feelings had seemed to cease to have any connection with what was
normal.

She had known too much; and yet she had been certain of nothing at all.

But she and Alec were like the people who began with a bad joke, and
then were driven and driven. It was impossible not to think of what
might come, and of what might be lost for ever. If the rail had not been
tried this afternoon, if big, foolish Emily Walderhurst had been lying
peacefully among the weeds to-night!

"The end comes to everyone," she said. "It would have been all over in a
few minutes. They say it isn't really painful."

Her lips quivered, and she pressed her hands tightly between her knees.

"That's a murderer's thought," she muttered querulously. "And yet I
wasn't a bad girl to begin with."