CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The forces within her were at truce.  She was conscious of a suspension of hostilities.  The moment was one in which she saw, as in a mirror, her poor, vague little soul in its hopeless wandering through life.  She drew back, not daring to see herself, and then was drawn forward by a febrile curiosity.  She felt towards them so differently that she could not think of herself as the same person when she was with Owen as she was when she was with Ulick.  She remembered what she had heard the “dresser” say, and she remembered the sin.  But apart from the deception she practised upon both men, there was the wrong-doing.  Her conscience did not assail her now; but she knew that she would suffer to-morrow or next day.  That sense of sin which she could not obliterate from her nature would rise to her lips like a salt wave, and poison her life with its bitterness, and she asked herself vain questions:  Why had she left her father?  Why had she two lovers?  Why did she rise to seek things that made her unhappy?  She thought of yesterday’s journey to see a dying woman, and of to-night’s performance of “Tristan and Isolde.”  What an unhappy, maddening jingle.  The bitter wave of conscience, which rose to her lips and poisoned her taste, forced from her an avowal that she would mend her life.  She foresaw nothing but deception, and easily imagined that not a day would pass without lies.  All her life would be a lie, and when her nature rose in vehement revolt, she looked round for means to free herself from the fetters and chains in which she had locked herself.  Thinking of Owen, she vowed that it must not happen again.  But what excuse would she give?  Should she tell him that Ulick was her lover?  That was the only way, only it seemed so brutal.  Even so she would have a lover; and strictly speaking, she ought to send them both away.  Very probably that is what she would do in the end....  In the meantime, she would keep them both on!  Her face contracted in an expression of terror and disgust.  Had her moralising, then, ended in such miserable selfishness as this?

To escape from her thoughts she looked out at the landscape, hoping it would distract her.  But she could take no interest in it.  Yesterday it had seemed so beautiful, but to-day it was all reversed, and the light was different.  She preferred to remember it.  She thought that they must be nearing the river, and she remembered how in one place it ran round a field, making a silver horse shoe in the green land, they had crossed it twice in the space of a quarter of a mile; then it followed the railway, placid, docile, reflecting the trees and sky.  Then like a child it was soon taken with a new idea; it ran far away out of sight, and Evelyn thought it would never return.  But it came back again, turbulent and shallow; and with woods on the steep hillside, and spanned by a beautiful stone bridge.  A little