‘Of course if you are satisfied I ought to be,’ said Mrs. Ferrers, with her ladylike shrug; ‘but I can only say that if I had a daughter I should not encourage her in a taste for boating. In the first place, because I cannot dispossess my mind of the idea of danger; and in the second, because I consider such an amusement revoltingly masculine. Daphne’s hands are ever so much wider since she began to row. I was horrified the other day at discovering that she wears six-and-a-half gloves.’ Daphne liked those quiet mornings on the lake, or a ramble among vineyards or orchards, with Monk for her sole companion, better than the formal pilgrimages to some scene made famous by the guide-books. Those excursions with her aunt and Mr. Goring and Edgar had become passing wearisome. The strain upon her spirits was too great. The desire to appear gay and happy and at ease exhausted her. The effort to banish thought and memory, and to take a rapturous pleasure in the beauty of a picturesque scene, or the glory of a summer sky, was becoming daily more severe. To talk twaddle with Edgar, to smile in his face, with that gnawing pain, that passion of longing and regret always troubling her soul, was a slow torture which she began to think must sooner or later be mortal. ‘Can I go on living like this for ever?’ she asked herself, after one of those endless summer days, when, in the same boat, in the same carriage with Gerald Goring, lunching at the same inn, admiring the same views, treading the same narrow paths or perilous wooden footbridges, she had yet contrived to keep herself aloof from him. ‘Can I always go on acting a part—pretending to be true when I am false to the core of my wicked heart, pretending to be happy when I am miserable?’