She lay now, picturing it to herself and planning a cunningly-laid deceit by which she should appear a lovely and noble figure in his eyes.  She would have a very “bad time,” of course, or somehow the thing would lose significance, and she would ask, nay implore, the doctor to promise her, if he could only save either the child or herself, to let it be the child.  And Joe would hear of it and know that it was because he wanted a child so much....  She might pretend to be delirious and murmur that he wanted the child so much more than he did her....  He would be in the room and hear her and she would pretend not to know it....

Thus Judy, luxuriating in the darkness, knowing in her clear brain that looked on so unswayed by her passionate weary heart, that Killigrew, for all his instinct for children, did not want them in the concrete, that if she bore him one he would love her just as much as he did now and no more.  That he would love her as much even while she was carrying it she believed, and rightly, for he was too natural a man himself ever to think nature ugly.

Judy lay imagining ... imagining ... and she thought of Nicky’s firm, soft little body, and how it had felt to her hungry hands and tried to feel it all over again in her bed and imagine it belonged to her and Joe.  And she saw the cold, pale dawn come in, and her dream shivered and fled before it, and she was left with only her bitter knowledge that it would never happen, and if it did, not that way.  And she wished with a futile frenzy of longing that she had never chosen to keep Killigrew by giving him her whole self in fee, but by refusing herself to him had been able to leave him and live down the hold he had on her soul and mind which had grown to such strength in those first three years.  Her first fear when she gave him everything had been lest attainment should dull even that want he had of her, but she found he had spoken truth when he said that that was a quality which grew with having.  For fewer men are bored with satiety than kept by a custom that becomes necessity, and his habit for her would in itself be an attraction for him.  But Killigrew, for all his cleverness, was not the man to know, if any could have, how passionate her withholding had been, how passionless was her surrender.

CHAPTER X

LONE TRAILS

So much of mental passion could be lived through upon one side of a wall and on the other Georgie wake fresh and unknowing of it all, stretch a moment, wonder as to what time Judy had come in, tip-toe to her room and peep, to see a sleeping face so pale and haggard that she withdrew, suddenly sorry, she did not quite know why.  Judy could look old ... she reflected.  Georgie herself felt a lilting sense of interest in this day which she had not hitherto during her stay at Paradise Cottage.  Nothing had happened, and yet somehow she felt different.  It was not even