of this damned place."

"I wouldn't go. Poor darling, she can't bear me out of her sight. I
believe I've worn a path going and coming."

They had left the beaten path. Their way lay in a line drawn straight
across the Heath from Brodrick's house. It was almost as if her feet had
made it.

"Jinny's path," he said.

They were silent, and he gathered up, as it were, the burden of their
silence when he stopped and faced her with his question--

"How are you going on?"

LIX

A YEAR passed and half a year, and she had not found an answer to
Tanqueray's question.

She had gone on somehow. He himself had made it easier for her by his
frequent disappearances. He had found a place somewhere on Dartmoor
where he hid himself from the destroyers, from the dreadful little
people, where he hid himself from Rose. It helped her--not to have the
question raised.

Now (they were in August of nineteen-ten) Tanqueray was back again with
his question. He had left her, about eleven o'clock in the evening, in
her study, facing it. Not but that he had provided her with a solution,
a positive solution. "Jinny," he had said, "why don't you do as I do?
Why don't you go away, if it was only for a few months every year?"

It seemed so simple, Tanqueray's solution, that at first she wondered
why it had not occurred to her before. But as she looked back over the
last three years she saw why. It could not have occurred to her as long
as she had had the charge of her own children. She would not be
entertaining it now if Gertrude were not there, looking after them. And
it would not have been possible if the baby, the little girl, her third
child, had lived. She had wanted to have a little girl, just to show
what she could do. She had said, "There shall be one happy woman in the
world and she shall be my daughter."

But the little girl had never lived at all. She had been brought forth
dead in the night that followed Mabel Brodrick's death. Jane had been
with Mabel when she died. That was in January six months ago.

After that there had come the great collapse, the six weeks when she lay
quiet and Gertrude, like an angel, waited on her. She had been allowed
to have the little boys with her for hours at a time then, she being
utterly unable to excite them. Sometimes, when she was not well enough
to have them very long, Gertrude would bring them in to look at her, the
little solemn-eyed, quiet boys, holding Gertrude's hands. Every da