s eyes, relegated, not
relinquished. She saw herself pursued, entrapped, confronted by Gregory,
equally entrapped, forced by her need, her helplessness, to come to her
and coldly determined--as she had seen him on that dreadful evening of
their parting--to do his duty by her, to make her and to keep her safe,
and his own dignity secure. To see him again, to strive against him
again, weaponless, now, without refuge, and revealed to herself and to
him as a creature whose whole life had been founded on illusion, to
strive not only against his ironic authority but, worst of all, against
a longing, unavowed, unlooked at, a longing that crippled and unstrung
her, and that ran under everything like a hidden river under granite
hills--she would die, she felt, rather than endure it.

She had closed her eyes as she leaned her head against the tree and when
she opened them she saw that the leaves of the tree had turned from
black to green and that the grass was green and the sea and sky faintly
blue. Above her head the long, carved ripples of the morning cirri
flushed with a heavenly pink and there came from a thicket of a little
wood the first soft whistle of a wakened bird. Another came and then
another, and suddenly the air was full of an almost jangling sweetness.
Karen felt herself trembling. Shudders ran over her. She was ravished to
life, yet without the answering power of life. Her longing, her
loneliness, her fear, were part of the intolerable loveliness and they
pierced her through and through.

She struggled to her feet, holding the tree in her clasp, and, after the
galvanised effort, she closed her eyes again, and again leaned her head
upon the bark.

Then it was that she heard footsteps, sudden footsteps, near. For a
moment a paralysis of fear held down her eyelids. "_Ach Gott!_" she
heard. And opening her eyes, she saw Franz Lippheim before her.

Franz Lippheim was dressed, very strangely dressed, in tweeds and
knicker-bockers and wore a soft round hat with a quill in it--the oddest
of hats--and had a knapsack on his back. The colours of the coming day
were caricatured in his ruddy face and red-gold hair, his bright green
stockings and bright red tie. He was Germanic, flagrant, incredible, and
a Perseus, an undreamed of, God-sent Perseus.

"_Ach Gott!_ Can it be so!" he was saying, as he approached her, walking
softly as though in fear of dispersing a vision.

And as, not speaking, still clasping her tree, she