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the sea half forgotten, a terror that Hester might come and summon her forth to retribution. She saw herself now as the creeping thing that Clive saw, the thing he would have shown to Hester last night. She had not thought explicitly of the revelation that had been conveyed to her with Clive’s words; but during the hours of stunned sleep all her awareness of Hester had shifted and on waking to the direful daylight she knew that she had traduced her and had never seen her truly. The fiercely believed myth of her present infidelity revealed itself for what it was; the shadow cast by her own hatred. Not only Ingpen’s face was there to dispel it—with those tears—but Hester’s also; the face of the repudiating Madonna. Such a woman, who had from the first avowed all her past to the man she loved, would not lie and creep clandestinely. She had loved Ingpen and put him out of her life; and if she had seen him yesterday it was because he had sought her out; or because she had summoned him to tell him that he must go. Yes; that must be the truth. But she would not have seen it unless Clive’s words had unsealed her eyes. ‘You know nothing about Clive and me: you never have,’ came back to her. It was the truth. Their lives had, from the first, been founded on sorrows, acceptances, under-