She looked at him.  She did not feel ashamed.

‘Now you must go,’ he said.

He opened the door, and, without another word, she went.  She walked through the streets as if nothing at all had happened.  She felt neither remorse nor revulsion.

Then Margaret felt every day that uncontrollable desire to go to him; and, though she tried to persuade herself not to yield, she knew that her effort was only a pretence:  she did not want anything to prevent her.  When it seemed that some accident would do so, she could scarcely control her irritation.  There was always that violent hunger of the soul which called her to him, and the only happy hours she had were those spent in his company.  Day after day she felt that complete ecstasy when he took her in his huge arms, and kissed her with his heavy, sensual lips.  But the ecstasy was extraordinarily mingled with loathing, and her physical attraction was allied with physical abhorrence.

Yet when he looked at her with those pale blue eyes, and threw into his voice those troubling accents, she forgot everything.  He spoke of unhallowed things.  Sometimes, as it were, he lifted a corner of the veil, and she caught a glimpse of terrible secrets.  She understood how men had bartered their souls for infinite knowledge.  She seemed to stand upon a pinnacle of the temple, and spiritual kingdoms of darkness, principalities of the unknown, were spread before her eyes to lure her to destruction.  But of Haddo himself she learned nothing.  She did not know if he loved her.  She did not know if he had ever loved.  He appeared to stand apart from human kind.  Margaret discovered by chance that his mother lived, but he would not speak of her.

‘Some day you shall see her,’ he said.

‘When?’

‘Very soon.’

Meanwhile her life proceeded with all outward regularity.  She found it easy to deceive her friends, because it occurred to neither that her frequent absence was not due to the plausible reasons she gave.  The lies which at first seemed intolerable now tripped glibly off her tongue.  But though they were so natural, she was seized often with a panic of fear lest they should be discovered; and sometimes, suffering agonies of remorse, she would lie in bed at night and think with utter shame of the way she was using Arthur.  But things had gone too far now, and she must let them take their course.  She scarcely knew why her feelings towards him had so completely changed.  Oliver Haddo had scarcely mentioned his name and yet had poisoned her mind.  The comparison between the two was to Arthur’s disadvantage.  She thought him a little dull now, and his commonplace way of looking at life contrasted with Haddo’s fascinating boldness.  She reproached Arthur in her heart because he had never understood what was in her.  He narrowed her mind.  And gradually she began to hate him because her debt of gratitude was so great.  It seemed unfair that he should