But when, at ten o’clock, he had not come back, she began to flutter in earnest.  She had said a dreadful thing!  And yet, in her heart, she did not take back her judgment.  He really had been a brute.  She would have liked to soothe herself by playing, but it was too late to disturb people, and going to the window, she looked out over the sea, feeling beaten and confused.  This was the first time she had given free rein to her feeling against what Winton would have called his “bounderism.”  If he had been English, she would never have been attracted by one who could trample so on other people’s feelings.  What, then, had attracted her?  His strangeness, wildness, the mesmeric pull of his passion for her, his music!  Nothing could spoil that in him.  The sweep, the surge, and sigh in his playing was like the sea out there, dark, and surf-edged, beating on the rocks; or the sea deep-coloured in daylight, with white gulls over it; or the sea with those sinuous paths made by the wandering currents, the subtle, smiling, silent sea, holding in suspense its unfathomable restlessness, waiting to surge and spring again.  That was what she wanted from him—­not his embraces, not even his adoration, his wit, or his queer, lithe comeliness touched with felinity; no, only that in his soul which escaped through his fingers into the air and dragged at her soul.  If, when he came in, she were to run to him, throw her arms round his neck, make herself feel close, lose herself in him!  Why not?  It was her duty; why not her delight, too?  But she shivered.  Some instinct too deep for analysis, something in the very heart of her nerves made her recoil, as if she were afraid, literally scared of letting herself go, of loving—­the subtlest instinct of self-preservation against something fatal; against being led on beyond—­yes, it was like that curious, instinctive sinking which some feel at the mere sight of a precipice, a dread of going near, lest they should be drawn on and over by resistless attraction.

She passed into their bedroom and began slowly to undress.  To go to bed without knowing where he was, what doing, thinking, seemed already a little odd; and she sat brushing her hair slowly with the silver-backed brushes, staring at her own pale face, whose eyes looked so very large and dark.  At last there came to her the feeling:  “I can’t help it!  I don’t care!” And, getting into bed, she turned out the light.  It seemed queer and lonely; there was no fire.  And then, without more ado, she slept.

She had a dream of being between Fiorsen and her father in a railway-carriage out at sea, with the water rising higher and higher, swishing and sighing.  Awakening always, like a dog, to perfect presence of mind, she knew that he was playing in the sitting-room, playing—­at what time of night?  She lay listening to a quivering, gibbering tune that she did not know.  Should she be first to make it up, or should she wait for him?  Twice she half slipped out of bed, but both times, as if fate meant her not to move, he chose that moment to swell out the sound, and each time she thought:  ’No, I can’t.  It’s just the same now; he doesn’t care how many people he wakes up.  He does just what he likes, and cares nothing for anyone.’  And covering her ears with her hands, she continued to lie motionless.