Everybody looked at her, and she looked at everybody, as she sat in the lamplight, and let it pour over her.  She seemed to be offering herself lavishly, recklessly, triumphantly, to the light.

Lady Cayley was a large woman of thirty-seven, who had been a slender and a pretty woman at thirty.  She would have been pretty still if she had been a shade less large.  She had tiny upward-tilted features in her large white face; but the lines of her jaw and her little round prominent chin were already vanishing in a soft enveloping fold, flushed through its whiteness with a bloom that was a sleeping colour.  Her forehead and eyelids were exceedingly white, so white that against them her black eyebrows and blue eyes were vivid and emphatic.  Her head carried high a Gainsborough hat of white felt, with black plumes and a black line round its brim.  Under its upward and its downward curve her light brown hair was tossed up, and curled, and waved, and puffed into an appearance of great exuberance and volume.  Exuberance and volume were the note of this lady, a note subdued a little by the art of her dressmaker.  A gown of smooth black cloth clung to her vast form without a wrinkle, sombre, severe, giving her a kind of slenderness in stoutness.  She wore a white lace vest and any quantity of lace ruffles, any number of little black velvet lines and points set with paste buttons.  And every ruffle, every line, every point and button was an accent, emphasising some beauty of her person.

And Anne looked at Lady Cayley once and no more.

It was enough.  The trouble that she had put from her came again upon her, no longer in its merciful immensity, faceless and formless (for she had shrunk from picturing Lady Cayley), but boldly, abominably defined.  She grasped it now, the atrocious tragedy, made visible and terrible for her in the body of Lady Cayley, the phantom of her own horror made flesh.

A terrible comprehension fell on her of that body, of its power, its secret, and its sin.

For the first moment, when she looked from it to her husband, her mind refused to associate him with that degradation.  Reverence held her, and a sudden memory of her passion in the woods at Westleydale.  Mercifully, they veiled her intelligence, and made it impossible for her to realise that he should have sunk so low.

Then she remembered.  She had known that it was, that it would be so, that, sooner or later, the woman would come back.  Her brain conceived a curious two-fold intuition of the fact.

It was all foreappointed and foreknown, that she should come to this hateful house, and should sit there, and that her eyes should be opened and that she should see.

And the woman’s voice rose again.  “Do I see cucumber sandwiches?” said Lady Cayley.  “Dick, go and tell Mr. Majendie that if he doesn’t want all those sandwiches himself, I’ll have one.”

Ransome gave the message, and Majendie turned to the lady of the settee, presenting the plate with the finest air of abstraction.  Her large arm hovered in selection long enough for her to shoot out one low quick speech.