was settled under the lee of a machine--happily
the shadow-side, for the sun was warm--and the white foam of the
undertow was guilty of a tremendous glare--the one the people who
can't endure the seaside get neuralgia from--and Sally was going to
come out of the second machine directly in the Turkey-twill knickers,
and find her way through the selvage-wave and the dazzle, or get
knocked down and have to try back. Surely Rosalind, instead of saying
over and over again that she _must_ be ready to meet the coming evil,
possibly close at hand, ought to make a serious effort to become so.
She found herself, even at this early hour of the day, tired with the
strain of a misgiving that an earthquake was approaching; and as those
who have lived through earthquakes become unstrung at every slightest
tremor of the earth's crust beneath them, so she felt that the
tension begun with that recurrence of two days ago had grown and
grown, and threatened to dominate her mind, to the exclusion of all
else. Every little thing, such as the look on her husband's face half
an hour ago, made her say to herself, as the earthquake-haunted man
says at odd times all through the day and night, "Is this _it_? Has
it come?" and she saw before her no haven of peace.

What was it now she really most feared? Simply the effect of the
revelation on her husband's mind--an effect no human creature could
make terms with. She was not the least afraid of anything he could say
or do, delirium apart; but see what delirium had made of him--she was
sure it was so--in that old evil hour when he had flung her from
him and gone away in anger to try to get her sentence of banishment
ratified. How could she guard against a repetition, in some form
or other, of the disastrous errors of that unhappy time?

As we know, she was still in ignorance of all the revived
memories he had told to Vereker; but she knew there had been
something--disjointed, perhaps, and not to be relied on, as the
doctor had said, but none the less to be feared on that account. She
had seen the effect of his sleepless night before he went away with
Vereker, and knew it to be connected with mental disturbance outside
and beyond mere loss of rest; and she had an uneasy sense that
something was being kept from her. She could not but believe Gerry's
cheerfulness was partly assumed. Had he been quite at ease about his
recollections, surely he would have told them to _her_. Then this
had all come on t