this towering doubt of her, this moral need which
shouted down all the mere matter on the earth and in the heavens above
the earth. Something eternal was at stake now, the faith in
righteousness of a human soul.

She had thought childishly, shallowly last night that she had had no
faith, and could live with none. That was because she had not conceived
what it would be to try to live without faith, because she had not
conceived that the very ground under her feet could give way. At that
very moment she had had a faith as boundless as the universe, and had
forgotten it. And now it was put in doubt. She could not live without
it. It was the only vital thing for her.

Was she the woman who had felt forced into acquiescing when Vincent
Marsh had said so boldly and violently, that she loved her husband no
more, that he was nothing to her now? It seemed to her at this moment
that it was a matter of the utmost unimportance whether she _loved_ him
or not; but she could not live without believing him. That was all. She
could not live without that. Life would be too utterly base . . .

Neale nothing to her? She did not know _what_ he was to her, but the
mere possibility of losing her faith in him was like death. It was a
thousand times worse than death, which was merely material. This
mattered a great deal more than the physical death of someone's body . . .
it was the murder, minute by minute, hour by hour, month by month, year
by year of all her married life, of all she had found lovable and
tolerable and beautiful and real in life.

Of course this could not be true . . . of course not . . . but if it were
true, she would find the corrosive poison of a false double meaning in
every remembered hour. She did not believe any of those hideously
marshaled facts, but if they were true, she would go back over all those
recollections of their life together and kill them one by one, because
every hour of her life had been founded on the most unthinking, the most
absolute, the most recklessly certain trust in Neale. To know that past
in peril, which she had counted on as safe, more surely than on anything
in life, so surely that she had almost dismissed it from her mind like a
treasure laid away in a safe hiding-place . . . to know those memories in
danger was a new torture that had never before been devised for any
human being. No one had the safe and consecrated past taken from him.
Its pricelessness shone on her with a blinding lig