ce of Brodrick's certainty, speak positively as to last
year.

She withdrew herself hastily, as from an unpleasant position, and was
followed by Sophy Levine.

"There's nothing for it," said Henry, "but to tell her."

"About the child?"

"About the child."

There was a terrible pause.

"Will you tell her," said Brodrick, "or shall I?"

"I'll tell her. I'll tell her now. But you must back me up."

Brodrick fetched Jane. He had found her as Gertrude had said. She was
heavy-eyed, and dazed with the embraces of her dream. But when she saw
the look that passed between Hugh and Henry her face was one white fear.
The two were about to arraign her. She took the chair that Henry held
for her.

Then he told her. And Brodrick backed him up with silence and a face
averted.

It was not until Henry had left them together that he spoke to her.

"Don't take it so hardly, Jinny," he said. "It's not as if you knew."

"I might have known," she answered.

She was thinking, "George told me that I should have to pay--that
there'd be no end to my paying."

LIII

The Brodricks--Hugh--Henry--all of them--stood justified. There was,
indeed, rather more justice than mercy in their attitude. She could not
say that they had let her off easily. She knew (and they had taken care
that she should know) the full extent of her misdoing.

That was it. They regarded her genius (the thing which had been tacked
on to her) more as a crime than a misfortune. It was a power in the
highest degree destructive and malign, a power utterly disintegrating to
its possessor, and yet a power entirely within her own control. They
refused to recognize in it any divine element of destiny, while they
remained imperturbably unastonished at its course. They judged it as
they would have judged any reprehensible tendency to excitement or
excess. You gave way to it or you did not give way. In Jane the thing
was monstrous. She had sinned through it the unforgivable sin, the sin
against the family, the race.

And she had been warned often enough. They had always told her that she
would have to pay for it.

But now that the event had proved them so deplorably right, now that
they were established as guardians of the obvious, and masters of the
expected, they said no more. They assumed no airs of successful
prophecy. They were sorry for her. They gathered about her when the day
of reckoning came; they couldn't bear to see her paying, to think that
sh