Hilda, alone in her own apartment—­it was difficult to keep Llewellyn Stanhope away from even that door in his pursuit of her signature—­considered the vagary life had become for her that was so whimsical, and the mystery of her secret which was so solely hers.  Alicia knew, of course; but that was as if she had written it down on a sheet of perfect notepaper and locked it up in a drawer.  Alicia did not speculate about it, and the whole soul of it was tangled now in a speculation.  There had been a time filled with the knowledge and the joy of this new depth in her like a buoyant sea, and she had been content to float in it, imagining desirable things.  Stanhope’s waiting contract made a limit to the time—­a limit she brought up against without distress or shock, but with a kind of recognising thrill in contact at last with the necessity for action, decision, a climax of high heart-beats.  She saw with surprise that she had lived with her passion these weeks and months half consciously expecting that a crucial moment would dissolve it, like a person aware that he dreams and will presently awake.  She had not faced till now any exigency of her case.  But the crucial moment had leapt upon her, pointing out the subjection of her life, and she, undefended, sought only how to accomplish her bonds.

Certainly she saw no solution that did not seem monstrous; yet every pulse in her demanded a solution; there was no questioning the imperious need.  She had the fullest, clearest view of the situation, and she looked at it without flinching and without compromise.  Above all she had true vision of Stephen Arnold, glorifying nowhere, extenuating nothing.  It was almost cruel to be the victim of such circumstance, and be denied the soft uses of illusion; but if that note of sympathy had been offered to Hilda she would doubtless have retorted that it was precisely because she saw him that she loved him.  His figure, in its poverty and austerity, was always with her; she made with the fabric of her nature a kind of shrine for it, enclosing, encompassing; and her possession of him, by her knowledge, was deep and warm and protecting.  I think the very fulness of it brought her a kind of content with which, but for Llewellyn and his contract, she would have been willing to go on indefinitely.  It made him hers in a primary and essential way, beside which any mere acknowledgment or vow seemed chiefly decorative, like the capital of a pillar firmly rooted.  There may be an appearance that she took a good deal for granted; if there is, I fear that in the baldness of this history it has not been evident how much and how variously Arnold depended on her, in how many places her colour and her vitality patched out the monkish garment of his soul.  This with her enthusiasm and her cognisance.  It may be remembered, too, that there was in the very tenderness of her contemplation of the priest in her path an imperious tinge born of the way men had so invariably melted there.  Certainly they had been men and not priests; but the little flickering doubt that sometimes leaped from this source through the glow of her imagination she quenched very easily with the reflection that such a superficies was after all a sophistry, and that only its rudiments were facts.  She proposed, calmly and lovingly, to deal with the facts.