But had it?  For after all, nothing dreadful had happened.  Roger had written to her the next day telling her that he would not take his allowance any more because he did not think he deserved it, and he must try and be a man and shift for himself, and saying that he was taking a situation in another town which he did not name.  That was the last they heard of him for a long time, for he came no more to Roothing for his holidays.  Presently, with an exultant sense of release, but with an increasing liability to bad dreams, she went abroad to join Richard, at first at the post he held at the Romanones Mines in Andalusia, and then in Rio de Janeiro.  There she was happy.  She was one of those Northerners to whom the South belongs far more truly than it does to any of its natives.  For over those the sun has had power since their birth, consuming their marrows and evaporating their blood so that they became pithless things that have to fly indoors for half the day and leave the Southern sun blazing insolently on the receptive Southern earth.  But with blood cooled and nerves stabilised by youth spent on the edge of the grey sea, she could outface all foreign seasons.  She could walk across the silent plaza when its dust lay dazzling white under the heat-pale sky and the city slept; the days of heavy rain and potent pervasive dampness pleased her by their prodigiousness; and when the thunderstorm planted vast momentary trees of lightning in the night she was pleased, as if she was watching someone do easily what she had always impotently desired to do.

And Richard was so wonderful to watch in this new setting that matched his beauty, easily establishing his dominion over the world as he had established it over her being from the moment of his conception.  There was a conflict raging in him which, since it never resulted in hesitancy, but in simultaneous snatchings at life by both of the warring forces, gave him the appearance of the calmest exultation.  He loved riding and dancing and gambling so much that his face was cruel when he did those things, as if he would kill anybody who tried to interrupt him in his pleasure.  But he gave the core of his passion to his work and disciplined all his days to the routine of the laboratory, so that he was always cool and remote like a priest.  It gave him pleasure to be insolent as rich men are, but all his insolence was in the interests of fineness and humility.  He was ambitious, so fastidious about the quality of his work that he rejected half the world’s offers to him.  And always he turned aside from his victories and smiled secretively at her, as if they were two exiles who had returned under false names to the country that had banished them and were earning great honours.  She wished this life could go on for ever.