lwark against misery which endured till the night fell, for in the few
hours that remained after she had finished the work she had now
undertaken on the farm she read his letters over and over again. They
were queer and disturbing and delicious letters, and they hinted that
there was a content in their relationship which had never yet been put
into words, for they were full of records of his successes in class and
at games.

Now he had that complete lack of satisfaction in his own performance
which superficial people think to be modesty, though it springs instead
from the sword-stiff extreme of pride; when he made his century in a
school match he was galled by the knowledge that he was not as good a
player as Ranji, and when he was head of the science side his pleasure
was mitigated to nearly nothing by his sense that still he did not know
as much about these things as Lord Kelvin. That he gave her every detail
of all his successes meant, she began to suspect, that he knew they were
both under a ban, and that he was handing her these evidences of his
superiority over the other people as an adjutant of a banished leader
might hand him arrows to shoot down on the city that had exiled him.
When he was home for the holidays he said nothing that confirmed this
suspicion, but she noticed that only when he was with her was his mouth
limpid and confident as a boy's should be; in the presence of others he
pressed his upper lip down on his lower so that it looked thin, which it
was not, with an air of keeping a secret before enemies. She loved this
sense of being entrenched quite alone with him in a fortress of love.
She would not have chosen another destiny, for she did not think that
she would ever have liked ordinary people even if they had been nice to
her.

But that was only her daylight destiny. In the night she staggered down
Roothing High Street under stones, or sat in the brown sunshine of the
dusty room and watched Peacey stroking his fat thigh and talking of his
dear dead mother; or felt his weight thresh down on her like the end of
the world; or took into her arms for the first time the limp body of the
other child. It did not avail her if she fought her way out of sleep,
for then she would continue to re-endure the scene in a frenzy of
memory, and either way she knew the agony that the experience had given
her with its first prick, coupled with the woe that came of knowing that
those things would go on and on, until