with a woman's guile, to laugh them off by
seeming to keep a child's uncomprehension of what they meant. Then she
had had a bad time to undergo during her mother's lingering illness and
death, before she could take her freedom. Her mother left her nothing,
but she had the kind little man's small income. She had been worn out by
the time everything was over; and owing to her mother's complaint, which
had made it impossible to have visitors at the house, and to her
jealousy, which had prevented Judy making many friends for herself
outside, she knew no one with whom she was intimate enough to ask for
advice and help. Killigrew had taken charge of her and been goodness
itself.

He kept clear always of the actual words and forms of love-making. He
was very fastidious and hated anything that went to vulgarise his
relationships, and would not spoil his genuine affection and intimacy
and passion for her or any other woman for whom he felt them by using
shibboleths that did not express what he really meant.

He took her away up to a quiet mountain country in Wales, and all the
weeks he looked after her there never showed any more passion than the
kisses and close embraces she was now used to, and those not often. He
was not only not ever an inconsiderate lover, but he was too much of an
epicure to take too much or too often even when he could. He left her
once or twice in those weeks to go to town, and she knew be saw other
women there, and the knowledge meant very little to her. Already she
was loving him more deeply than she knew and understanding him more
deeply still, and she knew jealousy would be the end of everything. If
she had begun to be jealous, it would have been so deadly, she would
have had so much to be jealous of, that she never dared let herself
indulge in it.

She had her reward when he once told her she was the only woman who had
never once asked him where he had been or whom he had been with. She was
so happy in the pain this self-repression gave her she hardly thought
how much happier she could have been had there been no need for it. If
that had been the case he would have been entirely different from what
he was, and then perhaps she would not have loved him at all.

The time in Wales was not spoilt by anything that made her unable to
face her own mind; never did his arms or lips encroach; she came back
still feeling she belonged to herself--still clinging to that physical
possession of self because s