She mumbled something through her furs.

‘And is he coming?’ asked Rose.

‘He said he’d try to.’  John lighted a cigar.

‘He’s very queer,’ said Millicent.

‘How?’ Rose aggressively demanded.

‘Well, imagine him going off like that.  He’s always going off suddenly.’  Millicent stopped and then added:  ’He only danced with mother.  But he’s a good dancer.’

‘I should think he was!’ Ethel murmured, roused from lethargy.  ’Isn’t he just, mother?’

Leonora mumbled again.

‘Your mother’s knocked up,’ said John drily.  ’These late nights don’t suit her.  So you reckon Mr. Twemlow’s a good dancer, eh?’

No one spoke further.  John threw his cigar into the road.

Under the rug Leonora could feel the knees of all her daughters as they sat huddled and limp with fatigue in the small body of the waggonette.  Her shoulders touched Ethel’s, and every one of Milly’s fidgety movements communicated itself to her.  Mother and children were so close that they could not have been closer had they lain in the same grave.  And yet the girls, and John too, had no slightest suspicion how far away the mother was from them, how blind they were, how amazingly they had been deceived.  They deemed Leonora to be like themselves, the victim of reaction and weariness; so drowsy that even the joltings of the carriage could not prevent a doze.  She marvelled, she could not help marvelling, that her spiritual detachment should remain unnoticed; the phenomenon frightened her as something full of strange risks.  Was it possible that none had caught a glimpse of the intense illumination and activity of her brain, burning and labouring there so conspicuously amid the other brains sombre and dormant?  And was it possible that the girls had observed the qualities of Arthur’s dancing and had observed nothing else?  Common sense tried to reassure her, and did not quite succeed.  Her attitude resembled that of a person who leans against a firm rail over the edge of a precipice:  there is no danger, but the precipice is so deep that he fears; and though the fear is a torture the sinister magnetism of the abyss forbids him to withdraw.  She lived again in the waltz; in the gliding motions of it, the delicious fluctuations of the reverse, the long trance-like union, the instinctive avoidances of other contact.  She whispered the music, endlessly repeating those poignant and voluptuous phrases which linger in the memory of all the world.  And she recalled and reconstituted Arthur’s physical presence, and the emanating charm of his disposition, and dwelt on them long and long.  Instead of lessening, the secret commotion within her increased and continued to increase.  While brooding with feverish joy over the immediate past, her mind reached forward and existed in the appalling and fatal moment, for whose reality however her eagerness could scarcely wait, when she should see him once more.  And