For weeks she had been living under a strain so intense that her feelings had seemed to cease to have any connection with what was normal.

She had known too much; and yet she had been certain of nothing at all.

But she and Alec were like the people who began with a bad joke, and then were driven and driven.  It was impossible not to think of what might come, and of what might be lost for ever.  If the rail had not been tried this afternoon, if big, foolish Emily Walderhurst had been lying peacefully among the weeds to-night!

“The end comes to everyone,” she said.  “It would have been all over in a few minutes.  They say it isn’t really painful.”

Her lips quivered, and she pressed her hands tightly between her knees.

“That’s a murderer’s thought,” she muttered querulously.  “And yet I wasn’t a bad girl to begin with.”

She began to see things.  The chief thing was a sort of vision of how Emily would have looked lying in the depths of the water among the weeds.  Her brown hair would have broken loose, and perhaps tangled itself over her white face.  Would her eyes be open and glazed, or half shut?  And her childish smile, the smile that looked so odd on the face of a full-grown woman, would it have been fixed and seemed to confront the world of life with a meek question as to what she had done to people—­why she had been drowned?  Hester felt sure that was what her helpless stillness would have expressed.

How happy the woman had been!  To see her go about with her unconsciously joyous eyes had sometimes been maddening.  And yet, poor thing! why had she not the right to be happy?  She was always trying to please people and help them.  She was so good that she was almost silly.  The day she had brought the little things from London to The Kennel Farm, Hester remembered that, despite her own morbid resentment, she had ended by kissing her with repentant tears.  She heard again, in the midst of her delirious thoughts, the nice, prosaic emotion of her voice as she said: 

“Don’t thank me—­don’t.  Just let us enjoy ourselves.”

And she might have been lying among the long, thick weeds of the pond.  And it would not have been the accident it would have appeared to be.  Of that she felt sure.  Brought face to face with this definiteness of situation, she began to shudder.

She went out into the night feeling that she wanted air.  She was not strong enough to stand the realisation that she had become part of a web into which she had not meant to be knitted.  No; she had had her passionate and desperate moments, but she had not meant things like this.  She had almost hoped that disaster might befall, she had almost thought it possible that she would do nothing to prevent it—­almost.  But some things were too bad.

She felt small and young and hopelessly evil as she walked in the dark along a grass path to a seat under a tree.  The very stillness of the night was a horror to her, especially when once an owl called, and again a dreaming bird cried in its nest.