d her that he loved her, and by the
sheer mischance of his hulking strength had thrown her to the ground;
since that day when she had spat out at him her hatred and contempt,
when she had called him "a barren rascal," and had lashed him into fury;
when, white with realisation that the secret was about to escape from
his lips, he had laid her on the sofa and had gone blindly into the
street. Now facing each other for the first time after many months, they
remembered all too poignantly that parting. The barren rascal who stood
before her was the man who had written every word of Adrian's triumphant
second novel, and had given it to her out of the largesse of his love.
And he had borne with patience all her imperious strictures and had
obeyed all her crazy and jealous whims. He had fooled her--quixotically
fooled her, it is true--but fooled her as never woman had been fooled in
the world before. And knowing Adrian to be the barren rascal, all the
time, never had he wavered in his loyalty, never had he uttered one
disparaging word. And he had secured the insertion of a life of Adrian
in the next supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography; and he
had helped her to set up that staring white marble monument in Highgate
Cemetery, with its lying inscription. Never had human soul been invested
in such a Nessus shirt of irony. No wonder she had passed through
Hell-fire. No wonder her soul had been scorched and shrivelled up. No
wonder the licking fires of unutterable shame kept her awake of nights.
And if she writhed in the flaming humiliation of it all when she was
alone, what was that woman's anguish of abasement when she stood face to
face, and compelled to speech, with the man whose loving hand had
unwittingly kindled that burning torment?

The poor human love for Adrian was not dead. That secret I had plucked
out of her heart a few weeks ago in the garden. How did she regard the
man who must have held Adrian in the worst of contempt, the contempt of
pity? She hated him. I was sure she hated him. I could not take my mind
off those two closeted together. What was happening? Again and again I
went over the whole disastrous story. What would be the end? I wearied
myself for a long, long time with futile speculation.

* * * * *

My library door opened, and Liosha, bright-eyed, with quivering lip and
tragic face, burst in, and seeing me, flung herself down by my side and
buried her head on t