Slowly, she gazed back over the path she had trod; where roses once had held up smiling heads.  It was choked now by brambles that scratched her nakedness at every step.  Ah, how easily she had been persuaded to enter it!  “We have the right to happiness,” he had said, and she had looked into his eyes and believed him.  What was this strange, elusive happiness, that she had so pantingly pursued and never overtaken? that essence pure and unalloyed with baser things?  Ecstasy, perhaps, she had found—­for was it delirium?  Fear was the boon companion of these; or better, the pestilence that stalked behind them, ever ready to strike.

Then, as though some one had turned on a light—­a sickening, yet penetrating blue light—­she looked at Hugh Chiltern.  She did not wish to look, but that which had turned on the light and bade her was stronger than she.  She beheld, as it were, the elements of his being, the very sources of the ceaseless, restless energy that was driving him on.  And scan as she would, no traces of the vaunted illimitable power that is called love could she discern.  Love he possessed; that she had not doubted, and did not doubt, even now.  But it had been given her to see that these springs had existed before love had come, and would flow, perchance, after it had departed.  Now she understood his anger; it was like the anger of a fiercely rushing river striving to break a dam and invade the lands below with devastating floods.  All these months the waters had been mounting . . . .

Turning at length from the consideration of this figure, she asked herself whether, if with her present knowledge she had her choice to make over again, she would have chosen differently.  The answer was a startling negative.  She loved him.  Incomprehensible, unreasonable, and un reasoning sentiment!  That she had received a wound, she knew; whether it were mortal, or whether it would heal and leave a scar, she could not say.  One salient, awful fact she began gradually to realize, that if she sank back upon the pillows she was lost.  Little it would profit her to save her body.  She had no choice between her present precarious foothold and the abyss, and wounded as she was she would have to fight.  There was no retreat: 

She sat up, and presently got to her feet and went to the window and stared through the panes until she distinguished the blue whiteness of the fallen snow on her little balcony.  The night, despite the clouds, had a certain luminous quality.  Then she drew the curtains, searched for the switch, and flooded the room with a soft glow—­that beautiful room in which he had so proudly installed her four months before.  She smoothed the bed, and walking to the mirror gazed intently at her face, and then she bathed it.  Afterwards she opened her window again, admitting a flurry of snow, and stood for some minutes breathing in the sharp air.