er, she had the solace of feeling that she had
completely freed him from any conceivable consequence of her act.

So far, the impetus of self-sacrifice had carried her straight to her
goal; but, as frequently happens with such atoning impulses, it left her
stranded just short of any subsequent plan of conduct. Her next step,
indeed, was clear enough: she must return to Hanaford, explain to her
husband that she had felt impelled to tell her own story to Mr.
Langhope, and then take up her ordinary life till chance offered her a
pretext for fulfilling her promise. But what pretext was likely to
present itself? No symbolic horn would sound the hour of fulfillment;
she must be her own judge, and hear the call in the depths of her own
conscience.

XXXIX

WHEN Amherst, returning late that afternoon from Westmore, learned of
his wife's departure, and read the note she had left, he found it, for a
time, impossible to bring order out of the confusion of feeling produced
in him.

His mind had been disturbed enough before. All day, through the routine
of work at the mills, he had laboured inwardly with the difficulties
confronting him; and his unrest had been increased by the fact that his
situation bore an ironic likeness to that in which, from a far different
cause, he had found himself at the other crisis of his life. Once more
he was threatened with the possibility of having to give up Westmore, at
a moment when concentration of purpose and persistency of will were at
last beginning to declare themselves in tangible results. Before, he had
only given up dreams; now it was their fruition that he was asked to
surrender. And he was fixed in his resolve to withdraw absolutely from
Westmore if the statement he had to make to Mr. Langhope was received
with the least hint of an offensive mental reservation. All forms of
moral compromise had always been difficult to Amherst, and like many men
absorbed in large and complicated questions he craved above all
clearness and peace in his household relation. The first months of his
second marriage had brought him, as a part of richer and deeper joys,
this enveloping sense of a clear moral medium, in which no subterfuge or
equivocation could draw breath. He had felt that henceforth he could
pour into his work all the combative energy, the powers of endurance,
resistance, renovation, which had once been unprofitably dissipated in
the vain attempt to bring some sort of harmony into l