April came; and, to Aliette, the fret of spring. More and more with every opening bud, with every deepening of the green leaf-haze along the river-bank below her windows, she yearned for children--for Ronnie's children. Her body gave no sign; but already, as though for warning, her mind was pregnant with a new power, the power of prophetic imagination which comes only to the isolated.

Sometimes--as when, after one of Mollie's rare visits, it showed her sister married to Wilberforce--this new power pleased Aliette; sometimes, playing about Hector, it frightened her. But always it made her restless; so that, abandoning more and more of her household duties to Caroline Staley, she walked again with Ponto, as she had walked in the old days when Ronnie was not yet hers.

Fulham Park knew the pair of them--and Barnes Common--and Putney Heath. Down the myriad streets that lead away from the river to the unexplored south of London they wandered as far as Shadwell Wood and Coombe Wood and Richmond Park. And always, from those walks, Aliette returned thoughtful; for now, as imagination pictured more and more clearly the fate of Dennis and of Etta should those dream-children be at last made real, there waxed in her the determination to strike the one last possible blow for legal freedom.

Hitherto pride, and to a certain extent the fear of still further exasperating him, had prevented her from making any personal move in Hector's direction. Hitherto she had acquiesced in the policy that others--Ronnie, Julia, the admiral, James Wilberforce--should fight for her. But all these had failed!

And, "Surely," thought Aliette, "surely it is my duty to conquer this pride, to put aside these fears, to meet him face to face."

But, despite the assurances of the imaginative power--which showed her herself resolute against Hector, reasoning with Hector, remonstrating with Hector, finally shaming Hector into giving her her freedom--Aliette could not bring herself to ask even the favor of an interview. Three separate times she sat down to the little satin-wood desk in the parlor, three separate times she took pen in hand; but each time determination failed at mere sight of the first uncompromising "Dear" on the tinted note-paper. Pride and her disdain for the man, courage and fear alike forbade her to cross that Rubicon.

"I'm a fool," she said to herself, "a fool and a funk. For Ronnie's sake, for the sake of Ronnie's mother, even for my own sake I ought to write. But I can't--I just can't." And the pen would drop from her nerveless fingers, leaving her soul prey to that utter despondency which only the prophetically imaginative suffer.

Meanwhile, the imaginative powers of another woman--powers so infinitely better trained than Aliette's that their least effort could formulate the written word--were concentrating on Hector Brunton. To Julia Cavendish, ever since the Bournemouth Tragedy, the mere name had become an obsession. Despite her growing prescience of death, despite the lethargy which every day made more potent over her limbs, the old lady's mind throbbed with activity. That tiniest protoplasm of a plan which she had conceived on Christmas day spored under her thoughts as coral-blossoms spore under the sea; till her brain, mistress of the written word, saw itself join issue with the brain of Hector Brunton, master of the word spoken--and defeat it.

"There is one weapon," thought Julia Cavendish, "one sure weapon with which I can pierce his armor." Yet somehow her hand tarried in the forging of that weapon, as though the moment were not yet come.