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DARK HESTER

How wonderfully they had acted. How marvellously. She was a loathsome girl, and she had known it from the first; and he a conscienceless, a crafty man; and she had known that from the first;—although he had smiled at her over little Robin’s head, with the released fountain shining above them;—although the strange, hot tears had come to his eyes in telling of his little dog.—‘It’s not to stone him.—What did he mean by that?—It’s not to stone him—if I must see the truth.’ She pressed her hand to her forehead standing in the sunlight that flowed warmly about her.—‘I must see the truth: because of Clive. Then I can judge. If they are here together—betraying Clive—they must go; they must both go.’ And still the tearing was at her heart, and she remembered his tears and saw, not his dog now but her own little Jeremy, who had died so quietly with his head laid in her hand.—Was that not all that he had asked of her? She felt now that her tears were trickling from beneath her fingers and that they brought a lassitude, almost an appeasement.—Death, peaceful death; the thought of death, of rest, had often of late come to her mind. All that there was to do, all that remained of life, was to think of Clive, to secure him. And she was to see Norah that afternoon;

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