of a loved girl to a hating woman. He found the situation, she
had thought at the time, and still thought after thirty years, far less
negotiable than a high love would have done. It did not occur to him
that he might take her away. He took it for granted that thereafter
they must be lost to each other. But save for his desire to blame her
for these mischances, which did not offend her, since it was so like the
harmless spite of a child that beats his racquet because it has sent his
ball into the next garden, he seemed not to be thinking of her part in
that loss at all. It was his extreme sense of his own loss that was
making him choke with tears. It appeared that love was not always a
shelter, a wing, a witty clemency, a tender alchemy. She stood half
asleep with shock until a sentence, said passionately in his delightful
voice which made one see green water running swiftly, and at first
refused admission to her mind by her incredulous love, confirmed itself
by reiteration. "Damn it all," he was saying, "you were unique!" At that
she cried out, "Oh, you are Peacey too! I will go back to Richard," and
turned and stumbled up the wet hillside.

It is true that Harry's desertion nearly killed her--that there was a
moment, as she breasted the hill-top and found herself facing the
malevolent red house where they had always told her that he did not
really love her, when she thought she was about to fall dead from excess
of experience and would have chosen to die so, if Richard had not waited
for her. Yet it was also true that for long she hardly ever thought of
Harry. Such fierce and unimagined passions and perplexities now filled
her, that the simple and normal emotions she felt for him became
imperceptible, like tapers in strong sunlight.

The day after their meeting she had found Aunt Alphonsine all a dry
frightened gibber, holding a whitefaced conference with Grandmother in
the parlour, and they had asked her if she had known that Peacey had
left Torque Hall that morning. She had shaken her head and given a
dry-mouthed smile, for she saw how terrified they were lest all that had
had a hand in her marriage were to be made to pay for it; but because
the child in her arms laughed, and the child in her womb had moved, she
was so torn between delight and loathing that she had no time to
speculate whether Harry had done this thing sweetly out of love for her
or cruelly out of bodily jealousy of Peacey. Nor, when a few weeks lat