possible wile or violence.

So that neither submission, nor a mere light tolerance and forgetting,
were possible. Other girls, it seemed, married Catholics and made nothing
of it--agreed pleasantly to differ all their lives. Her heart cried out!
There could be no likeness between these Catholic husbands and Alan
Helbeck.

In the first days of their engagement she had often said to herself: "I
need have nothing to do with it!" or "Some things are so lovely!--I will
only think of them." In those hours beside the sea it had been so easy to
be tolerant and kind. Helbeck was hers from morning till night. And she,
so much younger, so weak and small and ignorant, had seemed to hold his
life, with all its unexplored depths and strengths, in her hand.

And now------

She threw herself down on a rock that jutted from the wet grass, and gave
herself up to the jealous pain that possessed her.

* * * * *

A few days more and Mr. Williams would be gone. There was some relief in
that thought. That strange scene in the drawing-room--deep as all
concerned had buried it in oblivious silence--had naturally made his
whole visit an offence to her. In her passionate way she felt herself
degraded by his very presence in the house. His eyes constantly dropt,
especially in her presence and Augustina's, his evident cold shrinking
from the company of women--she thought of them with disgust and anger.
For she said to herself that now she understood what they meant.