of her being, and her mind was thick with lees of ancient sentiment, and wrecks of belief had floated up and hung in mid memory.  She knew that the beauty of the ritual, the eternal psalms, the divine sacrifice, the very ring of the bell, the antiquity of the language, lifted her out of herself, and into a higher, a more intense ecstasy than the low medium of this world’s desires.  And if she did not believe that the bread and wine were the true body and blood of God, she still believed in the real Presence.  She was aware of it as she might be of the presence of someone in the room, though he might be hidden from her eyes.  Though the bread and wine might not be the body and blood of Christ, still the act of consecration did seem to her to call down the spirit of God, and it had seemed to her to inhabit the church at the moment of consecration.  It might not be true to Owen, nor yet to Ulick, but it was true to her—­it was a difference of vision....  She sat buried in herself.  Then she walked to the window confused and absorbed, with something of the dread of a woman who finds herself suddenly with child.  When Ulick came to her she did not notice him, and when he asked her to do some music with him she refused, and when he put his arms about her she drew away sullenly, almost resentfully.

A few days after she was in Park Lane.  She had gone there to pay some bills, and she was going through them when she was startled by the front door bell.  It was a visitor without doubt.  Her thoughts leaped to Monsignor, and her face lighted up.  But he did not know she was at Park Lane; he would not go there....  It was Owen come up from Bath.  What should she say to him?  Good heavens!  It was too late to say she was not at home.  He was already on the stairs.  And when he entered he divined that he was not welcome.  They sat opposite each other, trying to talk.  Suddenly he besought her not to throw him over....  She had to refuse to kiss him, and that was convincing, he said.  Once a woman was not greedy for kisses, the end was near.  And his questions were to the point, and irritatingly categorical.  Had she ever been unfaithful to him?  Did she love Ulick Dean?  Not content with a simple denial, he took her by both hands, and looking her straight in the face, asked her to give him her word of honour that Ulick Dean was not her lover, that she had never kissed him, that she had never even desired to kiss him, that no idea of love making had ever arisen between them.  She pledged her word on every point, and this was the second time that her liaison with Ulick had obliged her to lie, deliberately in so many words.  Nor did the lying even end there.  He wanted her to stay, to dine with him; she had to invent excuses—­more lies.