s flooded
with moonlight and, beyond, the rim of the Sound lay smooth and shining.
Caroline had the key of the lodge, and the door creaked as she opened
it. She stepped into the long, low room radiant with the moonlight which
streamed through the bow window and lay in a silvery pool along the
waxed floor. Even that part of the room which lay in the shadow was
vaguely illuminated; the piano, the tall candlesticks, the picture
frames and white casts standing out as clearly in the half-light as
did the sycamores and black poplars of the garden against the still,
expectant night sky. Caroline sat down to think it all over. She had
come here to do just that every day of the two weeks since d'Esquerre's
departure, but, far from ever having reached a conclusion, she had
succeeded only in losing her way in a maze of memories--sometimes
bewilderingly confused, sometimes too acutely distinct--where there was
neither path, nor clue, nor any hope of finality. She had, she realized,
defeated a lifelong regimen; completely confounded herself by falling
unaware and incontinently into that luxury of reverie which, even as
a little girl, she had so determinedly denied herself, she had been
developing with alarming celerity that part of one which sets up an idol
and that part of one which bows down and worships it.

It was a mistake, she felt, ever to have asked d'Esquerre to come
at all. She had an angry feeling that she had done it rather in
self-defiance, to rid herself finally of that instinctive fear of him
which had always troubled and perplexed her. She knew that she had
reckoned with herself before he came; but she had been equal to so much
that she had never really doubted she would be equal to this. She had
come to believe, indeed, almost arrogantly in her own malleability and
endurance; she had done so much with herself that she had come to think
that there was nothing which she could not do; like swimmers, overbold,
who reckon upon their strength and their power to hoard it, forgetting
the ever-changing moods of their adversary, the sea.

And d'Esquerre was a man to reckon with. Caroline did not deceive
herself now upon that score. She admitted it humbly enough, and since
she had said good-by to him she had not been free for a moment from
the sense of his formidable power. It formed the undercurrent of her
consciousness; whatever she might be doing or thinking, it went on,
involuntarily, like her breathing, sometimes welling