The trees of the Green Park, under which she was passing now, had still a few leaves, and they gleamed in the lamplight copper-coloured as that girl’s hair.  All sorts of torturing visions came to her.  Those empty chambers!  She had seen one little minute of their intimacy.  A hundred kisses might have passed between them—­a thousand words of love!  And he would lie to her.  Already he had acted a lie!  She had not deserved that.  And this sense of the injustice done her was the first relief she felt—­this definite emotion of a mind clouded by sheer misery.  She had not deserved that he should conceal things from her.  She had not had one thought or look for any man but him since that night down by the sea, when he came to her across the garden in the moonlight—­not one thought—­and never would!  Poor relief enough!  She was in Hyde Park now, wandering along a pathway which cut diagonally across the grass.  And with more resolution, more purpose, she began searching her memory for signs, proofs of when he had changed to her.  She could not find them.  He had not changed in his ways to her; not at all.  Could one act love, then?  Act passion, or—­horrible thought!—­when he kissed her nowadays, was he thinking of that girl?

She heard the rustling of leaves behind.  A youth was following her along the path, some ravening youth, whose ungoverned breathing had a kind of pathos in it.  Heaven!  What irony!  She was too miserable to care, hardly even knew when, in the main path again, she was free from his pursuit.  Love!  Why had it such possession of her, that a little thing—­yes, a little thing—­only the sight of him with another, should make her suffer so?  She came out on the other side of the park.  What should she do?  Crawl home, creep into her hole, and lie there stricken!  At Paddington she found a train just starting and got in.  There were other people in the carriage, business men from the city, lawyers, from that—­place where she had been.  And she was glad of their company, glad of the crackle of evening papers and stolid faces giving her looks of stolid interest from behind them, glad to have to keep her mask on, afraid of the violence of her emotion.  But one by one they got out, to their cars or their constitutionals, and she was left alone to gaze at darkness and the deserted river just visible in the light of a moon smothered behind the sou’westerly sky.  And for one wild moment she thought:  ’Shall I open the door and step out—­one step—­peace!’

She hurried away from the station.  It was raining, and she drew up her veil to feel its freshness on her hot face.  There was just light enough for her to see the pathway through the beech clump.  The wind in there was sighing, soughing, driving the dark boughs, tearing off the leaves, little black wet shapes that came whirling at her face.  The wild melancholy in that swaying wood was too much for Gyp; she ran, thrusting her feet through the deep