This, then, was the problem she had brought unsolved from London, and which, she was afraid, she would bring back there without solution. The knowledge of it had burst upon her on the evening when Jack had told her what he had heard said of her, and her first conscious utterance that showed she knew of its existence was when that involuntary cry, "Ah, don't touch me!" came uninvited to her lips. Her long and gradual estrangement from her husband had immeasurably widened at that moment. In an instant his figure had leaped to remote horizons, and she had but to turn her head to see how close beside her stood another, he of whom her husband had spoken. This she had not known before; but the knowledge had come in a flash, staining backwards, as it were, through the past pages of her life, so that it seemed to her that she had loved him since the time when they were boy and girl together, and it made her view her married life with an incredulous horror. And by what sinister revelation had she gained this knowledge? For it was the fact that people spoke of Jim as her lover that had made her definitely aware she loved him. And it had been Jack through whom this knowledge was conveyed.
It was this knowledge that made her distrust herself as utterly as if her own soul and spirit had just been introduced to her among a crowd of strangers. She had thought she had known herself, and now this thing had started out upon her as if she had been asleep in a dark room, and had been wakened to find the chamber blazing with lights. Whether she had the will or the strength to resist she did not yet know; the purpose alone she could utterly answer for. But she realized that if again she saw him in such sort as she had seen him on the Sunday afternoon by the river, or on that afternoon when she had told him of her conversation with Maud Brereton, it would be a more difficult task to make him keep silence. She felt she could scarcely answer for her own silence. How much less, then, for her power of stopping the speech which a word from her would have even then brought to utterance! And now----
She rose, feeling that the only hope of victory lay in turning away from thoughts like these, and not, under the specious pretext of consciously fighting them, in reality making them familiar to her mind; for familiarity in such things breeds, not contempt, but acquiescence, half contemptuous it may be, but half consenting, and she knew that in face of certain temptations it is cowardice not to run away. The sun was already off the lawn, and a cooler breeze had begun to stir the intense heat of the afternoon. Tea had long been waiting for her under the cedar, and she walked slowly along the terrace and down the ten steps which led on to the lawn. This terrace had been an expensive whim of Jack's grandfather; it ran the length of the house, and was paved and balustraded with rose-coloured Numidian marble; urns, wreathed in delicate creepers which spilt splashes of vivid colour, stood at intervals along it; and below it blossomed a superb riband flower-bed bordering the lawn where stood the cedar.