Four days in every week Jane had a letter from Gertrude and once a week a letter from Brodrick. She was thus continually assured that all was well and that Brodrick was very comfortable with Gertrude.

She was justified in staying on, since her genius had come back to her, divinely placable, divinely propitiated and appeased.

She knew that in a measure she owed this supreme reconciliation to George Tanqueray. Her genius was virile. He could not give it anything, nor could it have taken anything he gave. He was passive to her vision and humble, on his knees, as he always had been, before a kindred immortality. What he did for her was to see her idea as she saw it, but so that through his eyes she saw steadily and continuously its power and perfection. She was aware that in the last five years she had grown dependent on him for that. For five years he had lifted her out of the abyss when she had found herself falling. Through all the surgings and tossings that had beset her he had kept her from sinking into the trough of the wave. Never once had he let go his hold till he had seen her riding gaily on the luminous crest.

His presence filled her with a deep and strong excitement. For two years, in their long separations, she had found that her craving for it was at times unbearable. She knew that when her flame died down and she was in terror of extinction, she had only to send for him to have her fear taken from her. She had only to pick up a book of his, to read a sentence of his, and she would feel herself afire again. Everything about him, his voice, his look, the touch of his hand, had this penetrating, life-giving quality.

Three weeks passed and Tanqueray was still staying in his inn at Chagford. In the mornings they worked, he on his book and she on hers. She saw him every afternoon or evening. Sometimes they took long walks together over the moors. Sometimes they wandered in the deep lanes. Sometimes, in rainy weather, they sat indoors, talking. In the last five years Tanqueray (who never used to show his work) had brought all his manuscripts for her to read. He brought them now. Sometimes she read to him what she had written. Sometimes he read to her. Sometimes he left his manuscript with her and took hers away with him. They discussed every doubtful point together, they advised each other and consulted. Sometimes they talked of other things. She was aware that the flame he kindled leaned to him, drawn by his flame. She kept it high. She wanted him to see how divine it was, and how between him and her there could be no question of passion that was not incorruptible, a fiery intellectual thing.

But every day Tanqueray walked up from the village to the farm. She looked on his coming as the settled, natural thing. Brodrick continued to assure her that the children were happy without her, and that he was very comfortable with Gertrude; and Tanqueray reiterated that it was all right, all perfectly right.

One day he arrived earlier than usual, about eleven o'clock. He proposed that they should walk together over the moor to Post Bridge, lunch at the inn there and walk back. Distance was nothing to them.

They set out down the lane. There had been wind at dawn. Southwards, over the hills, the clouds were piled up to the high sun in a riot and glory of light and storm. The hills were dusk under their shadow.

The two swung up the long slopes at a steady pace, rejoicing in the strong movement of their limbs. It was thus that they used to set out together long ago, on their "days," over the hills of Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire. Jane remarked that her state now was almost equal to that great freedom. And they talked of Brodrick.

"There aren't many husbands," she said, "who would let their wives go off like this for months at a time."

"Not many. He has his merits."

"When you think of the life I lead him at home it takes heaps off his merit. The kindest thing I can do to him is to go away and stay away. George, you don't know how I've tormented the poor darling."

"I can imagine."

"He was an angel to bear it."

She became pensive at the recollection.

"Sometimes I wonder whether I ought, really, to have married. You told me that I oughtn't."

"When?"

"Six years ago."

"Well—I'm inclined to say so still. Only, the unpardonable sin in a great artist—isn't so much marrying as marrying the wrong person."

"He isn't the wrong person for me. But I'm afraid I'm the wrong person for him."

"It comes to the same thing."

"Not altogether." She pondered. "No doubt God had some wise purpose when he made Hugh marry me. I can see the wise purpose in Owen's marrying Laura, and the wise purpose in his not marrying Nina; but when it comes to poor, innocent Hugh tying himself up for ever and ever with a woman like me——"

"Don't put it on God. His purpose was wise enough."

"What was it?"

"Why—obviously—that I should have married you, that Hugh should have married Gertrude, and that some reputable young draper should have married Rose."

"Poor little Rose!"

"Poor little Rose would have been happy with her draper; Gertrude would have been happy with Brodrick; you—no, I, would have been divinely happy with you."

She laughed. "Oh, would you!"

"That was the heaven-appointed scheme. And there we were, all five of us, bent on frustrating the divine will—I beg Gertrude's pardon—Gertrude's will was entirely in accord."

"It sounds delightfully simple, but I doubt if it would have worked out so. We've all got as much of each other as we want."

"That's what we haven't got. Very large, important pieces of each of us have been taken and given to the wrong person. Look at you—look at me."

She looked at him. "My dear, the largest and most important part of you is kept well out of the reach of Rose's little fingers. You and I have quite as much of each other as is good for us. If we were to tear each other to pieces there'd be nothing left of us."

Thus lightly they handled it, setting out in the morning.

Their pace slackened. They had begun to think.

She had always been a little hard on him about Rose, Tanqueray thought. It was as if she accused him, or rather his genius, of a monstrous egoism. Surely that only meant that it was indomitably sound and sane. A reckless sanity it had, a soundness capable of any risks. There never was any man who so defied the forces of dissolution, who had so profound an instinct of self-preservation.

Such a nature was bound to be inhospitable to parasites. By the very ease with which it assimilated all food of earth and heaven, it starved them at the roots.

It was not that he deliberately cast off any tender thing that clung to him. It was that the sheer impulse of growth in him was so tremendous that it burst through and out-soared the embracing and aspiring bonds. His cruelty (for it was cruelty from the poor parasite's point of view) was like Nature's, unconscious and impersonal.

It was not his fault, therefore, if Rose's arms, try as she would, could never hold him. It was not that he was indifferent to Rose or to her suffering, or that he shrank in moral cowardice from dealing with it as a man should deal. It was that the voice of implacably wise, and indubitably sane instincts warned him that he would accomplish no great thing if he turned to contemplate her tragedy, still less if he accepted it as his own. Incorruptible impulses urged him to evasion. And it was thus that in the seven years of his marriage he had achieved almost complete oblivion of her.

But Jane—Jane was a creature of like impulses and of the same stature as he. Her dependence on him, if she was dependent, was for such things as overflowed from him, that cost him no effort to bestow. And she gave as superbly as she received. There was nothing in the least parasitic about Jane. She had the freedom of all the spaces of earth and heaven. She could tramp the hills beside him with the same breath and stride.

He had given her his hand for the last steep ascent. She sprang to it and took it in her fine, firm grasp; but he felt no great pull upon his arm. She kept step with him and reached the top unflushed, unpanting.

Watching her, he saw how marriage had ripened her slender body and given to it the beauty that it had lacked. She was more feminine than ever. She had added that invincible quality to the sexless charm that had drawn him hitherto, drawn him irresistibly, but on paths remote from disaster.

(He had forgotten that he had been aware that she was formidable ever since he had first realized that she belonged to another man.)

They lunched at Post Bridge, at the little inn that Tanqueray knew. They drove (a sudden inspiration seizing them) to Merivale and back. They stopped at their inn again for tea, and faced untired the long tramp of the return. It was evening when they reached the last moor that lay between them and the farm lane.

The long uphill road unwound itself before them, a dun-white band flung across the darkening down. A veil of grey air was drawn across the landscape. To their left the further moors streamed to the horizon, line after line, curve after curve, fluent in the watery air. Nearer, on the hillside to their right, under the haze that drenched its green to darkness, the furze threw out its unquenchable gold.

Jane was afraid of her thoughts and Tanqueray's. She talked incessantly. She looked around her and made him see how patches of furze seen under a haze showed flattened, with dark bitten edges, clinging close like lichen on a granite wall; and how, down the hillsides, in the beds of perished streams, the green grass ran like water.

"I love your voice," he said, "but I wish you'd look at me when you're talking."

"If I did," she said, "I couldn't talk."

The truth leaped out of her, and she drew in her breath, as if thus she could recall it; seeing all that it meant, and knowing that he who saw everything must see.

A silence fell on them. It lasted till they topped the rise.

Then Tanqueray spoke.

"Yes. A precious hash we've all made of it. You and I and Brodrick and poor Nina. Could anything be more fatuous, more perverse?"

"Not all of us. Not Owen. He didn't go far wrong when he married Laura."

"Because the beast's clairvoyant. And love only made him more so; while it makes us poor devils blind as bats."

"There's a dear little bat just gone by us. He's so happy."

"Ah—you should see him trying to fly by daylight."

Silence and the lucid twilight held them close.

"Jinny—do you remember that walk we had once, coming back from Wendover?"

She did not answer him.

"Jinny—we're there again and where we were then. We've slipped everything between. Positively, I can't remember now what came between."

It was her state, also. She could have owned it. Only that to her it was strange and terrible, the facility with which they had annihilated time and circumstance, all that had come between. It was part of their vitality, the way they let slip the things that hurt, the way they plunged into oblivion and emerged new-made.

"We must have gone wrong somewhere, in the beginning," he said.

"Don't let's talk about it any more."

"It's better to talk about it than to bottle it up inside us. That turns it to poison."

"Yes."

"And haven't we always told the truth to each other?"

"Not in the beginning. If we only had——"

"We didn't know it then."

"I knew it," she said.

"Why didn't you tell me, then?"

"You know what you'd have thought of me if I had."

"You shouldn't have cared what I thought. You should have risked it."

"Risked it?"

"Risked it."

"But I risked losing you altogether. What did you risk?"

He was silent.

"Why do you blame me? It was your fault, your choice."

"Was it really mine? Was it I who went wrong?"

"Yes," she said. "In the beginning. You knew I cared for you."

"If you'd let me see it."

"Oh, you saw it. I didn't tell you in as many words. But I let you see it. That was where I went wrong."

"Yes, yes." He assented, for it was truth's hour. "You should have made me feel it."

"How could I?"

"That was it. You couldn't."

"I couldn't when I knew you'd seen it."

"How did you know?"

"Oh—you took good care of that."

"Was I a brute? Was I a brute to you, Jinny?"

She smiled.

"Not as men go. You couldn't help it. There was no deceiving me."

"Why, after all, shouldn't you have told me?"

"Why indeed?"

"It's a preposterous convention that leaves all the truth-telling to the unhappy man."

"Still—there it is. We can't get over it."

"You could have got over it. It wasn't made for you."

"It was made for all women. And for one who has been wrecked by it there are millions who have been saved. It was made for me more than any of them."

"If you prefer other women's conventions to your own happiness."

"Would it have been happiness to have given my heart and my soul to somebody who had no use for them and showed it?"

"You insist that I showed it?"

"You showed me plainly that it wasn't my heart and my soul you wanted."

"There you're wrong. There was a moment—if you'd only known it."

"I did know."

"What did you know?"

"I knew there was some power I had, if I had known how to use it."

"And didn't you?"

"I don't know. You see, I didn't try."

"You know how to use it now, I can tell you, with a vengeance."

"No. It isn't the same power, I think."

"At any rate you knew that it was touch and go with me? That if you'd chosen you might have done anything with me?"

"I knew that any other woman could have done the same."

"Then why not you?"

"I? I didn't want to hold you that way. I had some decency. I loved my poor friend too much to take him at a disadvantage."

"Good God! So that was your view of it? I was sacrificed to your invincible ignorance."

"Oh no, to my knowledge. Or shall we say to an honourable scruple?"

"Honourable?"

"Yes. The whole honour of women lies in that."

"I hope you see where the whole honour of women has landed us at last."

They had reached the lane leading to their farm. Its depth held them closer than the twilight held. The trees guarded them. Every green branch roofed a hollow deep with haze.

"If you were a cold woman I could understand it."

"I couldn't. It's because I was anything but cold."

"I know. You were afraid then."

"Yes. I was mortally afraid."

Above the lane, on the slope of the foot hills, they could see their farm, a dim grey roof in a ring of ash-trees. A dim green field opened out below it, fan-wise with a wild edge that touched the moor. It seemed to her with her altered memory that it was home they were drawing near.

"George," she said, "you know women as God knows them; why didn't you know me? Can't you see what I was afraid of? What we're all afraid of? What we're eternally trying to escape from? The thing that hunts us down, that turns again and rends us."

"You thought you saw that in me?"

"I don't see it now."

"Not now," he whispered.

They had come to the porch of the farmhouse. The door stood open. The lamp-light drew them in. He closed the door behind them. She stood facing him as one who waits.

"Not now," he said aloud.

He glanced round. The house and all about it was still.

"If we could always be here, Jinny——"

She turned from him, afraid.

"Why not?" he said, and followed her and took her in his arms.

He pressed back her head with one hand. His face sought hers, the face she knew, with its look of impetuous flight, of curves blown back, the face that seemed to lean forward, breasting the wind of its own speed. It leaned now, swift to its desire. It covered her face. Its lips were pressed to her lips, lips that drank her breath, that were fierce in their drinking, after their long thirst. She pushed it from her with her two hands and cried out, "Rose, little Rose!"

She struggled from his arms and ran from him, stumbling up the steep stairs. A door opened and shut. He heard her feet go slowly on the floor of her room above him. They reached the bed. She seemed to sink there.

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