to re-enter some moral heritage from which, for months,
her helpless love had shut her out.

Lying there, her cheeks still wet but her eyes now stern and steady, she
felt herself sustained, as if by sudden wings, at a vertiginous height
from which she looked down upon herself and upon her love. What had it
been, that love? what was it but passion pure and simple, the craving
feminine thing, enmeshed in charm. To a woman of her training, her
tradition, must not a love that could finally satisfy her nature, its
deeps and heights, be a far other love; a love of spirit rather than of
flesh? What was all the pain that had warped her for so long but the
inevitable retribution for her back-sliding? Old adages came to her,
aerial Emersonian faiths. Why, one was bound and fettered if feeling was
to rule one and not mind. Friendship, deep, spiritual congeniality, was
the real basis for marriage, not the enchantment of the heart and
senses. She had been weak and dazzled; she had followed the
will-o'-the-wisp--and see, see the bog where it had led her.

She saw it now, still sustained above it and looking down. Her love for
Gerald was not a high thing; it called out no greatness in her;
appealed to none; there was no spiritual congeniality between them. In
the region of her soul he was, and would always remain, a stranger.

Sure of this at last, she rose and wrote to Franklin, swiftly and
urgently. She did not clearly know what she wanted of him; but she felt,
like a flame of faith within her, that he, and he only, could sustain
her at her height. He was her spiritual affinity; he was her wings.
Merely to see him, merely to steep herself in the radiance of his love
and sympathy, would be to recover power, poise, personality, and
independence. It was a goal she flew towards, though she saw it but in
dizzy glimpses, and as if through vast hallucinations of space.

She told Franklin to come at six. She gave herself one more day; for
what she could not have said. A lightness of head seemed to swim over
her, and a loss of breath, when she tried to see more clearly the goal,
or what might still capture and keep her from it.

She told Amelie that she had a bad headache and would spend the day on
her sofa, denying herself to Lady Blair; and all day long she lay there
with tingling nerves and a heavily beating heart--poor heart, what was
happening to it in its depths she could not tell--and Gerald did not
write or come.

At tea-time M