neither check its rush nor wrench loose from it and drop out--oh, how
blessedly--into darkness and cessation. She must go bounding on, racked,
broken, but alive in every fibre. The most she could hope was a few hours'
respite, not from her own terrors, but from the pressure of outward claims:
the midday halt, during which the victim is unbound while his torturers
rest from their efforts. Till her father's return she would have the house
to herself, and, the question of the venison despatched, could give herself
to long lonely pacings of the empty rooms, and shuddering subsidences upon
her pillow.

Her first impulse, as the mist cleared from her brain, was the habitual one
of reaching out for ultimate relations. She wanted to know the worst; and
for her, as she saw in a flash, the worst of it was the core of fatality
in what had happened. She shrank from her own way of putting it--nor was
it even figuratively true that she had ever felt, under faith in Denis,
any such doubt as the perception implied. But that was merely because her
imagination had never put him to the test. She was fond of exposing herself
to hypothetical ordeals, but somehow she had never carried Denis with her
on these adventures. What she saw now was that, in a world of strangeness,
he remained the object least strange to her. She was not in the tragic case
of the girl who suddenly sees her lover unmasked. No mask had dropped from
Denis's face: the pink shades had simply been lifted from the lamps, and
she saw him for the first time in an unmitigated glare.

Such exposure does not alter the features, but it lays an ugly emphasis
on the most charming lines, pushing the smile to a grin, the curve of
good-nature to the droop of slackness. And it was precisely into the
flagging lines of extreme weakness that Denis's graceful contour flowed.
In the terrible talk which had followed his avowal, and wherein every word
flashed a light on his moral processes, she had been less startled by what