knew it.  For one thing, he was never away from her long enough at a time to get a thoroughly new vision of her on his return, a vision apart from that which he was expecting to see.  For another, she took more care with him.  Other people might see her unpowdered, bleak—­never he.  And for this, too, she had paid the penalty.  Sometimes when he held her, gazing down into the face she had prepared with so much skill to meet that look—­counting half upon the material aids upon her skin and half upon the state she should have evoked in him before she courted that gaze—­then she would think to herself:  “And if I were not ‘tidied,’ if I were ‘endy,’ looking greasy, as I have all day, he would not be feeling like this....”  Then with that thought would flash into her aching heart:  “On so frail a thread hangs love....”

But it was not anything in Killigrew which had eaten into her consciousness this past week—­it was something in herself.  Something which had risen to its crest that night among the bracken had failed ever since, was falling on deadness, and that something was her own power to feel the love which had made her life for so long.  There were always periods of deadness—­she knew that—­but this held a quality none of them had had.  What if even she were subject to the inevitable law, if for her too after the apex came the downward slope?  That was the fear that gnawed at her, that was what she dreaded when the Parson had held out exactly that as a hope.

While she had been suffering and loving she had longed for the release of cessation; now she dreaded it, for it undermined to her the whole of the past.  She was one of those women to whom faithfulness in herself was a necessity of self-respect, and failure of love, without any deflection of it, was to her a failure of faithfulness.  She had nothing tangible to go upon; it was only that she felt this deadness now upon her was not the mere reaction of feeling, but an actual snapping of something in the fabric of life.  She told herself it was not possible, that not so could she give the lie to all she had suffered.

As she went up the lane to Paradise she met Ishmael coming down it; evidently he had been taking Georgie home.  She stopped to speak to him, and, feeling he was reluctant to pass on by himself yet awhile, she leant over a gate and let him talk to her.  For a minute or so he said nothing that was not an ordinary commonplace of encounter, but after a short silence had fallen between them he began abruptly on another note.

“Judy,” he said, “do you believe in what is called ’falling in love’?”

“Do I believe in it?” echoed Judith.  “It depends on how you mean that.  If you ask do I believe that there is such a phenomenon, I do, for the simple reason that one sees it happening all around one and people doing the maddest things under its influence.  If you mean do I think it’s a good thing, or a pleasant thing, or a thing that lasts ...?”