She sighed as she thought of Jimmy.  The boy was going to complicate her life.  She was by nature an unusually fearless woman, but she was beginning to realize that there might come a time when she would know fear—­unless she could begin to live differently as Jimmy began to grow up.  But how could she do that?  There are things which seem to be impossible even to strong wills.  Her will was very strong, but she had always used it not to renounce but to attain, not to hold her desires in check but to bring them to fruition.  And it was late in the day to begin reversing the powerful engine of her will.  She was not even sure that she could reverse it.  Hitherto she had never genuinely tried to do that.  She did not want to try now, partly—­but only partly—­because she hated to fail in anything she undertook.  And she had a suspicion, which she was not anxious to turn into a certainty, that she who had ruled many people was only a slave herself.  Perhaps some day Jimmy would force her to a knowledge of her exact condition.

For the first time in her life she was half afraid of that mysterious energy which men and women call love; she began to understand, with a sort of ample fulness of comprehension, that of all loves the most determined is the love of a mother for her only son.  A mother may, perhaps, have a son and not love him; but if once she loves him she holds within her a thing that will not die while she lives.

And if the thing that was without lust stood up in battle against the thing that was full of lust—­what then?

The black and still night seemed a battlefield.

Softly she stepped upon the highest terrace and stood for a moment under the great plane tree, where was the wooden seat on which she had waited for Dion to weep away the past and the good woman who had ruined his life.  To-night she was invaded by an odd uncertainty.  If she went to the pavilion and Dion were not there?  If he did not come?  Would some part of her, perhaps, be glad, the part that in a mysterious way was one with Jimmy?  She stared into the darkness, looking towards the pavilion.  Dion Leith had once said she looked punished.  Perhaps when he had said that he had shown that he had intuition.

Was he there?  It was past eleven now.  She had assumed that he would come, and she was inclined to believe that he had come.  If so she need not see him even now.  There was still time for her to go back to the villa, to shut herself in, to go to bed, as Jimmy had gone to bed.  But if she did that she would not sleep.  All night long she would lie wide awake, tossing from side to side, the helpless prey of her past life.

She frowned and slipped through the darkness, almost like a fluid, to the pavilion.

CHAPTER VIII

She came so silently that Dion heard nothing till against the background of the night he saw a shadow, her thin body, a faint whiteness, her face, motionless at the opening of the pavilion; from this shadow and this whiteness came a voice which said: