k from him with a
gesture of abhorrence.

Justine watched him with panting lips, her knees trembling under her.
"But you wrote it--you wrote it! I thought you meant it!" she cried, as
the book spun across a table and dropped to the floor.

He looked at her coldly, almost apprehensively, as if she had grown
suddenly dangerous and remote; then he turned and walked out of the
room.

* * * * *

The striking of the clock roused her. She rose to her feet, rang the
bell, and told the maid, through the door, that she had a headache, and
was unable to see Miss Cicely. Then she turned back into the room, and
darkness closed on her. She was not the kind to take grief passively--it
drove her in anguished pacings up and down the floor. She walked and
walked till her legs flagged under her; then she dropped stupidly into
the chair where Amherst had sat....

All her world had crumbled about her. It was as if some law of mental
gravity had been mysteriously suspended, and every firmly-anchored
conviction, every accepted process of reasoning, spun disconnectedly
through space. Amherst had not understood her--worse still, he had
judged her as the world might judge her! The core of her misery was
there. With terrible clearness she saw the suspicion that had crossed
his mind--the suspicion that she had kept silence in the beginning
because she loved him, and feared to lose him if she spoke.

And what if it were true? What if her unconscious guilt went back even
farther than his thought dared to track it? She could not now recall a
time when she had not loved him. Every chance meeting with him, from
their first brief talk at Hanaford, stood out embossed and glowing
against the blur of lesser memories. Was it possible that she had loved
him during Bessy's life--that she had even, sub-consciously, blindly,
been urged by her feeling for him to perform the act?

But she shook herself free from this morbid horror--the rebound of
health was always prompt in her, and her mind instinctively rejected
every form of moral poison. No! Her motive had been normal, sane and
justifiable--completely justifiable. Her fault lay in having dared to
rise above conventional restrictions, her mistake in believing that her
husband could rise with her. These reflections steadied her but they did
not bring much comfort. For her whole life was centred in Amherst, and
she saw that he would never be able to free himself from the tr