Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/73

Rh awry he might have done good work there. Now that power was partly derelict, like all else. But the emotions roused by it were sharp yet, and the dainty poise of the girl's head arrested him.

It was the end of that struggle begun more than a month back which had brought Jennifer to church this day. She had not come before because that sharp, painful awakening had shocked her out of all her normal beliefs, and for a while all things natural and true were distorted for her as the vision of a nine-days' kitten is distorted when it opens its eyes for the first time. Jennifer's eyes opened for the first time when she fled in unreasoning terror from Ducane through the sounding house. And when he had found her, and bullied her and kissed her with all the primitive fierceness of his nature, she had hated him—until the tenseness broke and she hated herself instead.

That mood held, standing her out in the full blaze of realisation where the nerves and fibres of her being lay unnaturally bare, quivering to each rough touch, and each coarse word. And then one night swept her outside all that for ever; one night when she heard Ducane's voice raised in the prayer of abject fear, and ran in to find the horror of it in his face and eyes, and Robison watching him in contemptuous speculation.

She had sent Robison away, and Ducane had sworn at her. And then he had come after her on his knees, hiding his face in her lap. Jennifer tasted the realities that night; and all the woman in her, all the stricken, dying love in her strove to make allowances, even as Tempest had said. Ducane's broken words, said on his knees, gave her back her values. They placed her husband and they placed herself. Ducane was a whole æon nearer the brute than she was; and because of that influence of hers of which .Tempest had spoken, he was beginning dimly to know it.

"You're so far away, Jenny," he said, gripping her waist with both his great hands. "I can hold you like this, and you're right as far away. What's the matter, Jenny? I love you. Byyou [sic] know I love you, don't you?"