he top of that Kreutzkammer one. The most upsetting
thing of all, though, was the change that had come over him suddenly
at breakfast, just after he had read aloud the name Herrick--a
name he had seemed not free from memory of when her tongue was
betrayed into speaking it--and the name Penderfield. If it was
due to this last, so much the worse! It was the name of all others
that was best for oblivion.

How hard it seemed that it must needs force itself to the fore in this
way! Its present intrusion into her life and surroundings was utterly
unconnected with anything in the past. Sally's friendship with Laetitia
began in a music-class six years ago. The Sales Wilsons were people
to all appearance as un-Indian as any folk need be. Why must Sally's
friend, of all others, be the object of its owner's unwelcome
admiration? To think, too, how near she had been to a precipice
without knowing it! Suppose she had come face to face with that woman
again! To be sure, her intercourse with Ladbroke Grove Road was
limited to one stiff exchange of calls in "the season." Still, it
might have happened ... but where was the use of begging and borrowing
troubles?

Was it, or was it not, the fact, she asked herself, that now, after
all these years, she thought of this woman as worse than her husband,
the iniquity of the accomplice as more diabolical than that of the
principal? She found she could not answer this in the negative
off-hand. The paradox was also before her that that incorrigible
amphibious treasure of hers, whose voice was even now shouting to
her more timorous friend from beyond the selvage-wave she had just
contemptuously dived through--that that Sally, inexchangeable for
anything she could conceive or imagine, must needs have been something
quite other than she was, had she come of any other technical
paternity than the accursed one she had to own to. Was there some
terrible law in Nature that slow forgiveness of the greatest wrong
that can be wrought must perforce be granted to its inflictor, through
the gracious survivor of a brutal indifference that would almost add
to his crime, if that were possible? If, so, surely the Universe must
be the work of an Almighty Fiend, a Demiurgus with a cruel heart, and
this the masterstroke of all his cunning. But what, in Heaven's name,
was the use of bruising her brains against the conundrums of the great
unanswered metaphysical sphinx? Better be contented with the easy
vernacular