o into danger again? But perhaps there was no
danger any more. A man who has tried to divorce his wife once, and has
failed, is scarcely likely to try again. Nevertheless she was full of
hesitation to-night.

This fact puzzled and almost alarmed her, for she was not given to
hesitation. She was a woman who thought clearly, who knew what she
wanted and what she did not want, and who acted promptly and decisively.
Perhaps she hesitated now because she had been forced to remain inactive
in this particular case for such a long time; or perhaps she had
received an obscure warning from something within her which knew what
she--the whole of her that was Cynthia Clarke--did not consciously know.

The leaves of the plane tree rustled above her head, and she sighed. As
she sat there in the purple darkness she looked like a victim; and for a
moment she thought of herself as a victim.

Even that man in the pavilion who was agonizing had said to her that she
looked "punished." She had been surprised, almost startled, by his flash
of discernment. But she was sure he thought that matter only a question
of coloring, of emaciation, of the shapes of features, and of the way
eyes were set in the head.

When would the lights far below go out? She hated her indecision. It was
new to her, and she felt it to be a weakness. Whatever she had been till
now, she had certainly never been a weak woman, except perhaps from
the absurd point of view of the Exeter Hall moralist. Scruples had been
strangers to her, a baggage she had not burdened herself with on her
journey.

Jimmy! That night Dion Leith had told her that he had seen the eyes of
his boy in the stream that flowed through the Kesstane Dereh. She looked
out into the purple night, and somewhere in the dim vastness full of
mysteries and of half revelations she saw the frank and merciless eyes
of a young Eton boy.

Should she be governed by them? Could she submit to the ignorant
domination of a child who knew nothing of the complications of human
life, nothing of the ways in which human beings are driven by imperious
desires, or needs, which have perhaps been sown in ground of flesh and
blood by dead parents, or by ancestors laid even with the dust? Could
she immolate herself before the altar of the curious love which grew
within her as Jimmy grew?

She was by nature perverse, and it was partly her love for Jimmy which
pushed her towards the man who killed his son. But she had not told