ny point she was without excuse. Every nerve
in her vibrated to the touch of honour.

Around her things went with the rhythm of faultless mechanism. There was
no murmur, no perceptible vibration at the heart of the machine. You
could not put your finger on it and say that it was Gertrude. Yet you
knew it. Time itself and the awful punctuality of things were in
Gertrude's hand. You would have known it even if, every morning at the
same hour, you had not come upon Gertrude standing on a chair winding up
the clock that Jane invariably forgot to wind. You felt that by no
possibility could Gertrude forget to wind up anything. She herself was
wound up every morning. She might have been a clock. She was wound up by
Brodrick; otherwise she was self-regulating, provided with a
compensation balance, and so long as Brodrick wound her, incapable of
going wrong. Jane envied her her secure and secret mechanism, her
automatic rhythm, the delicate precision of her ways. Compared with them
her own performance was dangerous, fantastic, a dance on a tight-rope.
She marvelled at her own preternatural poise.

She was steady; they could never say she was not steady. And they could
never say it was not difficult. She had so many balls to keep going.
There was her novel; and there was Brodrick, and the baby, and
Brodrick's family, and her own friends. She couldn't drop one of them.

And at first there came on her an incredible, effortless dexterity. She
was a fine juggler on her tight-rope, keeping in play her golden balls
that multiplied till you could have sworn that she must miss one. And
she never missed. She kept her head; she held it high; she fixed her
eyes on the tossing balls, and simply trusted her feet not to swerve by
a hair's-breadth. And she never swerved.

But now she was beginning to feel the trembling of the perfect balance.
It was as if, in that marvellous adjustment of relations, she had
arrived at the pitch where perfection topples over. She moved with tense
nerves on the edge of peril.

How tense they were she hardly realized till Tanqueray warned her.

It was on Friday, that one day of the week when Brodrick was kept late
at the office of the "Morning Telegraph." And it was August, two months
after the coming of Gertrude Collett. Tanqueray, calling to see Jane, as
he frequently did on a Friday, about five o'clock in the afternoon,
found her in her study, playing with the baby.

She had the effrontery to hold the ba