e had scarcely the right to grudge William any use of her name, seeing
what her fault against him had been from first to last. And yet Denham!
She had a view of him as a judge. She figured him sternly weighing
instances of her levity in this masculine court of inquiry into feminine
morality and gruffly dismissing both her and her family with some
half-sarcastic, half-tolerant phrase which sealed her doom, as far as
he was concerned, for ever. Having met him so lately, the sense of his
character was strong in her. The thought was not a pleasant one for
a proud woman, but she had yet to learn the art of subduing her
expression. Her eyes fixed upon the ground, her brows drawn together,
gave William a very fair picture of the resentment that she was forcing
herself to control. A certain degree of apprehension, occasionally
culminating in a kind of fear, had always entered into his love for her,
and had increased, rather to his surprise, in the greater intimacy of
their engagement. Beneath her steady, exemplary surface ran a vein of
passion which seemed to him now perverse, now completely irrational, for
it never took the normal channel of glorification of him and his doings;
and, indeed, he almost preferred the steady good sense, which had always
marked their relationship, to a more romantic bond. But passion she had,
he could not deny it, and hitherto he had tried to see it employed in
his thoughts upon the lives of the children who were to be born to them.

"She will make a perfect mother--a mother of sons," he thought; but
seeing her sitting there, gloomy and silent, he began to have his doubts
on this point. "A farce, a farce," he thought to himself. "She said that
our marriage would be a farce," and he became suddenly aware of their
situation, sitting upon the ground, among the dead leaves, not fifty
yards from the main road, so that it was quite possible for some one
passing to see and recognize them. He brushed off his face any trace
that might remain of that unseemly exhibition of emotion. But he was
more troubled by Katharine's appearance, as she sat rapt in thought upon
the ground, than by his own; there was something improper to him in her
self-forgetfulness. A man naturally alive to the conventions of society,
he was strictly conventional where women were concerned, and especially
if the women happened to be in any way connected with him. He noticed
with distress the long strand of dark hair touching her shoulder