“‘The peace of God, which passeth all understanding....’ I’ve always thought that those words, coming where they do, are the most beautiful thing in any rite. It’s like ...” He seemed to be about to enter on a long train of thought, but suddenly he said, “Oh, my dear,” and he laid his head on her shoulder, his eyes closed, and the lines of his face drooping. They sat silent for a long time, and slowly into hers there came an expression of a deep and restful tenderness, a minute softening of all the lines and angles of his chiselled countenance; and at last he said, very low: “Oh, you must end it!” and she answered in an echo of his tone: “No, no. Don’t ask me. It isn’t fair;” and she knew that if she looked at his tired face again, or if again his voice sounded so weary, that she would surrender to his terms. He answered: “Oh, I’m not asking that. I promised that I wouldn’t, and I’m not. It’s the other thing that you must end. You don’t know what it means to me.” She said: “What?” with an expression of bewilderment, a queer numb expression, and whilst he brought out in slow and rather broken phrases, “It’s an unending strain ... And I feel I am responsible ... It goes on night and day ... I can’t sleep ... I can’t eat ... I have got the conviction that suddenly he might grow violent and murder....” Her face was hardening all the while. It grew whiter and her eyes darkened. “You’re talking of Dudley Leicester?” she said, and slowly she removed her arm from beneath his hand. She stood up in front of him, clear and cool in her grey dress, and he recovered his mastery of himself. “But, of course,” he went on, “that’s only a sort of nightmare, and you’re going to put an end to it. If we start back now you could see him to-night.” She put her hands behind her back, and said with a distinct and clear enunciation: “I am not going to.” He looked at her without much comprehension. “Well, to-morrow, then. Next week. Soon?” “I am not going to at all,” she brought out still more hardly. “Not to-day. Not this week. Not ever.” And before his bewilderment she began to speak with a passionate scorn: “This is what I was to discover beneath the weathercock! Do you consider what a ridiculous figure you out? You bring me here to talk about that man. What’s he to you, or you to him? Why should you maunder and moon and worry about him?” “But ...” Robert Grimshaw said, and she burst into a hard laugh. “No wonder you can’t give in to me if you’ve got to be thinking of him all the time. Well, put it how you will, I have done with him, and I’ve done with you. Go your own idiotic ways together. I’ve done with you.” And with her hands stretched down in front of her she snapped the handle of her parasol, her face drawn and white. She looked down at the two pieces contemptuously, and threw them against the iron-bolted, oak church door. “That’s an end of it,” she said. Grimshaw looked up at her, with his jaw dropping in amazement. “But you’re jealous!” he said.