daged it.

"This thing has got to heal," he said, "before I go."

She saw his going now as her own deed. It was she, not Brodrick, who was
sending him to Manchuria. It was she who had pushed him to the choice
between poverty and that dangerous exile. It was all done six weeks ago
when she handed him over to Jane Holland. She was aware that in his
desperate decision Brodrick counted for more than Jane, and Laura
Gunning for more than Brodrick; but behind them all she saw herself;
behind all their movements her own ruinous impulse was supreme.

She asked herself why she had not obeyed the profounder instinct that
had urged her to hold him as long as she had the power to hold? For she
had had it. In his supersensual way he had cared for her; and her
nature, with all its murkiness, had responded to the supersensual
appeal. Her passion for Owen was so finely strung that it exulted in its
own reverberance, and thus remained satisfied in its frustration,
sublimely heedless of its end. There had been moments when she had felt
that nothing could take Owen from her. He was more profoundly part of
her than if they had been joined by the material tie. She was bound to
him by bonds so intimately and secretly interwoven that to rupture any
one of them would kill her.

She knew that, as a matter of fact, he was not the first. But her
experience of Tanqueray was no help to her. Separation from Tanqueray
had not killed her; it had made her more alive, with the fierce vitality
of passion that bore hatred in its blood. She had no illusion as to the
nature of her feelings. Tanqueray had a devil, and it had let loose the
unhappy beast that lurked in her. That was all.

Owen, she knew, had seen the lurking thing, but he had not played with
it, he had not drawn it; he had had compassion on the beast. And this
terrible compassion hung about her now; it kept her writhing. Each day
it screwed her nerves tighter to the pitch. She told herself that she
preferred a brutality like Tanqueray's which would have made short work
of her.

As yet she had kept her head. She was on her guard, her grip to the
throat of the beast.

She was now at the end of Owen's last day. He had come and gone. She had
endured the touch of his hands upon her for the last time. Her wound was
inflamed, and she had had peace for moments while it gnawed into her
flesh, a tooth of fire, dominating her secret pain. He had stood beside
her, his body touching hers, unaware o