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Hester? You haven’t told me that. It seems to me that where there is such love as that between you and Clive it is secure against all such danger.’

Hester, sustaining her arm, walked beside her, illumined in her blue against the pine-trees, and glancing at her, as she kept silence, Monica saw that it was with an effort that she now kept back her tears. ‘Tell me, Hester,’ she said.

‘Can’t you see?’ said Hester, holding her head high and keeping her eyes fixed before her. ‘It’s partly you and partly Godfrey. He couldn’t stand finding out like that. You will say that I ought to have told him at once when I found that Godfrey was living here. Perhaps I should have. Only I’m accustomed, in a way, to protecting Clive. He goes under so horribly, you know; while I’m as strong as a horse. And I couldn’t bear to make him so miserable; to bring it all up, after we’d said nothing for all these years. He begged me to say nothing more, when I told him, down in Cornwall. He didn’t want to hear the name of the man who had made me so unhappy;—though I did tell him that it was in Paris, just after I’d left Girton; but he said we’d forget it and that the only difference it made was that I was the dearer to him because of what I’d suffered. But I don’t think he ever really did forget