Page:Possession (1926).pdf/487

 eral times. He had talked with Ellen while they walked up and down the long garden beneath the mottled plane trees. She had watched them, secretly, wondering at the calm fashion in which they talked and at the inhuman hardness of Ellen. (She herself would have weakened and yielded long ago.) And each time he had gone away defeated, she knew, for the time being.

And then, slowly, bit by bit, the story came to her. She heard it even before Hattie heard it, how they had quarreled and how he had even gone so far as to strike her in a sudden gust of wild and unsuspected anger. She heard too of the women in the hotel at Tunis and of another woman, the wife of a French official living in a villa near them. Ellen had seen them walking together one night when she had stolen from the house to follow him.

"Think of it!" she cried to Lily. "I descended even to that . . . even to spying. Oh, he is a monster. You have no idea the sort of a man he is."

And yet (thought Lily) she loves him, or she would not feel so violently. And Lily did have an idea what sort of a man he was; she knew far more than Ellen imagined, for she was a woman of great experience, however discreet she may have been. That was perhaps the reason why every one bore their confidences to Lily first of all.

"And yet," continued Ellen as they sat late one night in the long drawing-room, "there are times when for a moment I can see how perfect a husband, how perfect a lover he could be, if he but chose to be. Once we could have been happy, for I was the stronger then and I know that I could have changed him. He is in love with me in a queer fashion. He has behaved like this with no other woman. . . . I am certain of it. . . . I could have changed him once, but it is too late now." And she, Ellen Tolliver, began to weep. "I am crying," she said, "because I have missed so much. I know that I shall never have another chance at happiness . . . of that sort."

She is crying (thought Lily) because she is a child who wants