Julia, after the light supper which she had been thankful to substitute for the long dinner of the past four years, wandered slowly through the fields drinking in that peace which descends¹ upon Hertfordshire at nightfall, in all its perfection. She leaned her arms on a fence, enjoying the Wordsworthian landscape: the wide fields with their hayricks like houses, the quiet cattle, the slowly moving stream, the soft masses of wood melting into the low sky. The red band had faded behind the sharp church spire². The night moths³ fluttered. The stillness was too soft to be profound, too sweet to inspire awe⁴.

But although she loved this twilight⁵ beauty and peace of England, of which she had had but a taste now and again, being usually at table during the most poetical⁶ hour of the English day, she felt a sudden antagonism⁷ to it to-night, as too perfect, too finished a thing for the world to possess while so many of its dark problems were unsolved. Although she had persistently⁸ refused to study the underworld under the escort of Bridgit, turning instinctively⁹ from all that would shatter the illusions among which she chose to live, she had not been able to shut out bare knowledge, and Nigel’s second and fourth books had been even more enlightening than his first. She smiled as she thought of Nigel, whom she had not seen since the end of her first matrimonial vacation. He had left England soon after and not returned. His father, incensed¹⁰ at his avowed

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