feeling. The room was not
safe, the house was not safe. Not now. She had been very imprudent. She
had run straight home to her hiding-place, her only refuge. Why had she
not waited to make sure that she was followed? Then she could have slipped
away in a different direction until she had evaded pursuit, and returned
to her room afterwards. She had been very foolish.

She approached her window and gazed down, but could discern nothing in the
darkness. She tried to shake off her fear, telling herself that it was
imagination. But her mind remained full of misgivings, and her inner
consciousness peopled the obscurity of the street below with lurking
figures.

Weariness overcame her. She retired from the window and laid down on her
bed, not to sleep, but to think. Her fright had turned her mind
temporarily from the contemplation of a greater disaster. That was the
arrest of Charles Turold. She had learnt the news from an evening paper
which she had bought at the corner of the street. The announcement was
very brief, merely stating that he had been arrested in Cornwall. The
guarded significance of the information was not lost upon her. Charles had
been captured on his way back to her, and her agonized heart whispered
that she was responsible for his fate.

Bitterly she now blamed herself for having let him go on the quest. She
hardly asked herself whether it had succeeded or failed, perhaps because
she had subconsciously accepted the view that Thalassa, after all, had
nothing to tell. Nor did she think of the calamity which had again
overtaken her love. The effect of her original renunciation was still
strong within her, and Charles's discovery of her and her promise to him
had not really altered her attitude. His finding her, and their subsequent
conversation in the room below, bore an air of the strangest unreality to
her, as if she had been merely an actor in a stirring scene which did not
actually affect her. Some subtle inward voice told her that these things
did not matter to her.

It was part of a feeling which she had always within her--the sense of
living under the shadow of some dark destiny which would not be mitigated
or withheld. It was a strange point of view for one so young, but it had
been hers ever since she remembered anything. The tragedy and the shame
which had come into her life recently had found her, as it were, waiting.
She regarded them merely as the partial fulfilment of the unescapable
thing w