on. Instinctively as Rosamund
left Father Robertson's little room she had tried to hide her face. She
had received a blow, and the pain of it frightened her. She was startled
by her own suffering. What did it mean? What did it portend? She had no
right to feel as she did. Long ago she had abandoned the right to such a
feeling.

The information Lady Ingleton had brought outraged Rosamund. Anger and a
sort of corrosive shame struggled for the mastery within her.

She felt humiliated to the dust. She felt dirty, soiled.

Dion had been unfaithful to her.

With whom?

The white face of Mrs. Clarke came before Rosamund in the murky street,
two wide-open distressed and intent eyes started into hers.

The woman was Mrs. Clarke.

Mrs. Clarke--and Dion. Mrs. Clarke had succeeded in doing what long ago
she had designed to do. She had succeeded in taking possession of Dion.

"Because I threw him away! Because I threw him away!"

Rosamund found herself repeating those words again and again.

"I threw him away, I threw him away. Otherwise----"

She reached the Sisterhood and went to her little room. How she
got through the remaining duties of that day she never remembered
afterwards. The calmness of routine flagellated her nerves. She felt
undressed and feared the eyes of the sisters. After the evening service
in the little chapel attached to the Sisterhood she was unable either to
meditate, to praise, or to pray. During the long pause for silent prayer
she felt like one on a galloping horse. In the intense silence her ears
seemed to hear the beating of hoofs on an iron road. And the furious
horse was bearing her away into some region of darkness and terror.

There was a rustling movement. The sisters slowly rose from their knees.
Again Rosamund was conscious of feeling soiled, dirty, in the midst of
them. As they filed out, she with them, a burning hatred came to her.
She hated the woman who was the cause of her feeling dirty. She wanted
to use her hands, to tear something away from her body--the dirt, the
foulness. For she felt it actually on her body. Her physical purity was
desecrated by--she wouldn't think of it.

When she was alone in her little sleeping-room, the door shut, one
candle burning, her eyes went to the wooden crucifix beneath which every
night before getting into her narrow bed she knelt in prayer, and she
began to cry. She sat down on the bed and cried and cried. All her flesh
seemed melting into te