She was suffering as she invariably did every time she gave the lover’s gift to Killigrew; and always she paid for the joy of yielding with hours of reaction.  She was wont to live over again in the drear spaces of time the history of her life since she had known him, and it was the history of her love for him and of very little else.  Now as she lay, spent but wakeful, sick at heart and soul, she saw again the self that had stayed in this house when first she grew to know him.  How little she had imagined then, in her pride and poise....  That was what stung her on looking back—­how little she had guessed.  If before her then had been flashed the vision of herself as his secret lover, how impossible she would have thought it.  Surely, having come to it, having lived in it now for so long, she ought to be able to see how and exactly when the step had been taken which had brought her to it, which had so altered herself and her views as to make it possible?  Yet, looking back, she could see no such one point between the self to whom it would have been impossible and the self to whom it was an acknowledged thing of long standing.  If life consisted of sudden steps, how easily could they be avoided, she thought, as she went again through the bitter waters to which she had never succeeded in growing indifferent.  It was these gradual slopes....  She could not even say, “It was that moment I first knew I loved him.”

She lay, her brow pressed against the pillow, and saw again the Killigrew and the Judy of those early days at Cloom when she had been staying with Blanche, taken down there almost unwillingly, certainly against the wishes of her people, who had not shared her enthusiasm for Miss Grey.  She had liked Killigrew at once; his odd, whimsical, slanting way of looking at life had appealed to the clever young girl whose intellect had developed in front of her emotional capacities.  It was her brain that had charmed him, more than her uncertain beauty; in those early days her personality had been so strong and her beauty still so hidden beneath its eccentricities, which later had added to it.  All the time Ishmael had been so deeply in love with Blanche she and Killigrew had been getting more intimate, and yet there was “nothing in it” then.

When had it begun?  Surely on that long train journey up to town there had been a new note, a feeling of something there had not been before ... partly because Blanche had left them at Exeter to make a cross-country connection, and she and he had had those first few hours of an enclosed intimacy they had not had before—­in the train.  What a queer, stuffy background ... hardly unromantic, though, when you thought of all trains stood for and had seen!  She had examined rather anxiously into her own feelings that night at home, she remembered, because she knew Killigrew’s views on marriage as the most unsatisfactory and immoral of states, and she did not wish to suffer.  She was not given to self-pity, and it never struck her