tted
much that she must leave behind her, and in particular the old panelled
house.

This was, however, the one part of Oxford that Milly did not grieve to
have lost, when she awoke once more from long months of sleep, to find
herself in a new home. For she had grown to be silently afraid of the
old house, with the great chimney-stacks like hollowed towers within it,
made, it seemed, for the wind to moan in; its deep embrasures and
panelling, that harbored inexplicable sounds; its ancient boards that
creaked all night as if with the tread of mysterious feet. Awake in the
dark hours, she fancied there were really footsteps, really knockings,
movements, faint sighs passing outside her door, and that some old
wicked life which should long since have passed away through the portals
of the grave, clung to those ancient walls with a horrible tenacity,
still refusing the great renunciation of death.

It was true that in the larger, more hurried world of London it was
easier to dissimulate her transformations than it had been in Oxford.
The comparative retirement in which Milly lived was easily explained by
her delicate health. It seemed as though in her sojourns--which more and
more encroached upon those of the original personality--the strong,
intrusive ego consumed in an unfair degree the vitality of their common
body, leaving Milly with a certain nervous exhaustion, a languor against
which she struggled with a pathetic courage. She learned also to cover
with a seldom broken silence the deep wound which was ever draining her
young heart of its happiness; and for that very reason it grew deeper
and more envenomed.

That Ian should love her evil and mysterious rival as though they two
were really one was horrible to her. Even her child was not unreservedly
her own, to bring up according to her own ideas, to love without fear of
that rival. Tony was like his father in the sweetness of his
disposition, as well as in his dark beauty, and he accented with
surprising resignation the innumerable rules and regulations which Milly
set about his path and about his bed. But although he was healthy, his
nerves were highly strung, and it seemed as though her feverish anxiety
for his physical, moral, and intellectual welfare reacted upon him and
made him, after a few weeks of her influence, less vigorous in
appearance, less gay and boylike than he was during her absence. Ian
dared not hint a preference for the animal spirits that Mildre