sobs that shook her were the totterings of the foundations of her
universe. For a while, in the intensity of her anguish, all thought was
excluded. Presently, however, when the body was spent, the mind began to
practise its subtle and intolerable torture, and she was invaded by a
sense of loneliness colder than the space between the worlds.

Where was she to go, whither flee, now that his wrath was turned against
her? On the strength of his love alone she had pinned her faith,
discarded and scorned all other help. And at the first contact with that
greater power which he had taught her so confidently to despise, that
strength had broken!

Slowly, she gazed back over the path she had trod; where roses once had
held up smiling heads. It was choked now by brambles that scratched her
nakedness at every step. Ah, how easily she had been persuaded to enter
it! "We have the right to happiness," he had said, and she had looked
into his eyes and believed him. What was this strange, elusive happiness,
that she had so pantingly pursued and never overtaken? that essence pure
and unalloyed with baser things? Ecstasy, perhaps, she had found--for was
it delirium? Fear was the boon companion of these; or better, the
pestilence that stalked behind them, ever ready to strike.

Then, as though some one had turned on a light--a sickening, yet
penetrating blue light--she looked at Hugh Chiltern. She did not wish to
look, but that which had turned on the light and bade her was stronger
than she. She beheld, as it were, the elements of his being, the very
sources of the ceaseless, restless energy that was driving him on. And
scan as she would, no traces of the vaunted illimitable power that is
called love could she discern. Love he possessed; that she had not
doubted, and did not doubt, even now. But it had been given her to see