As for Olivia, she felt an overpowering desire to flee away.  Speeding through the house, where workmen were nailing up cases or sacking rugs, she felt that she was fleeing—­fleeing anywhere—­anywhere—­to hide herself.  As a matter of fact, the flight was inward, for there was nowhere to go but to her room.  Her way was down the short staircase from the attic and along a hall; but it seemed to her that she lived through a succession of emotional stages in the two or three minutes it took to cover it.  Her first wild cry “It isn’t true!  It isn’t true!” was followed by the question “Why shouldn’t it be true?” to end with her asking herself:  “What difference does it make to me?”

“What difference can it make to me?”

She had reached that form of the query by the time she took up her station at the window of her room, to stare blankly at the November landscape.  She saw herself face to face now with the question which, during the past month, ever since Davenant’s sudden disappearance, she had used all her resources to evade.  That it would one day force itself upon her she knew well enough; but she hoped, too, that before there was time for that she would have pronounced her marriage vows, and so burned her bridges behind her.  Amid the requirements of duty, which seemed to shift from week to week, the one thing stable was the necessity on her part to keep her promise to the man who had stood by her so nobly.  If once it had seemed to her that Davenant’s demands—­whatever they might prove to be—­would override all others, it was now quite clear that Ashley’s claim on her stood first of all.  He had been so loyal, so true, so indifferent to his own interests!  Besides, he loved her.  It was now quite another love from that of the romantic knight who had wooed a gracious lady in the little house at Southsea.  That tapestry-tale had ended on the day of his arrival at Tory Hill.  In its place there had risen the tested devotion of a man for a woman in great trouble, compelled to deal with the most sordid things in life.  He had refused to be spared any of the details she would have saved him from or to turn away from any of the problems she was obliged to face.  His very revolt against it, that repugnance to the necessity for doing it which he was not at all times able to conceal, made his self-command in bringing himself to it the more worthy of her esteem.  He had the defects of his qualities and the prejudices of his class and profession; but over and above these pardonable failings he had the marks of a hero.

And now there was this thing!

She had descried it from afar.  She had had a suspicion of it before Davenant went away.  It had not created a fear; it was too strange and improbable for that; but it had brought with it a sense of wonder.  She remembered the first time she had felt it, this sense of wonder, this sense of something enchanted, outside life and the earth’s atmosphere.  It was at that moment on the lawn when, after the unsuccessful meeting between Ashley and Davenant, she had turned with the latter to go into the house.  That there was a protective, intimate element in her feeling she had known on the instant; but what she hadn’t known on the instant, but was perfectly aware of now, was that her whole subconscious being, had been crying out even then:  “My own!  My own!”