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 Still she was silent. He could hardly believe in her beautiful, terrible silence. They reached the house again before she spoke. And they were the same words as before: 'It is impossible.'

'No; no! Not impossible!' Her silence had given him an immense advantage. It was as if he had felt her come into his arms. She could not now take herself back. 'Not impossible. I would come when the others are asleep. I know the way. And I would guard you. No one would ever know. I can stay on in Buissac. Madame de Lamouderie's portrait is our screen. Even now, up there, she does not dream of what is between us. I will keep it from her; from Jill. We are strong enough; both of us. And the one impossible thing is that we should not love one another—completely.'

His eyes were on her, and as she felt them her faint, strange, violent blush answered him. Her face was inundated with her awareness of him and with her pain. And cursing himself for his grossness, his brutality, he saw that it was pain; and then, as she walked on in her silence, that she did not shrink from it, or from him. Overwhelmed, even desperate she might be, but it seemed to him that she resented nothing; that she saw as plainly as he did their necessity and their resources. Only after the silence had grown long, after they had walked and turned again, did he hear her speak. A faint, a rigid voice. 'No; no,' she said; and the words seemed forced from her. 'I could not bear it.'