He lounged to the window, and threw it open. The January day was closing, not in any glory of sunset, but with interwoven greys and pearls, and delicate yellow lights slipping through the clouds. "I shall always have _this_"--he said to himself, passionately, as he drank in the air and the beauty--"whatever happens." Recollection brought back to him Delia's proud, virginal youth, and her springing step as she walked beside him through the wood. His mind wavered again between triumph and self-disgust. His muddy past returned upon him, mingled, as always, with that invincible respect for her, and belief in something high and unstained in the depths of his own nature, to which his weakened and corrupt will was yet unable to give any effect. "What I have done is not 'me'"--he thought. "At any rate not all 'me.' I am better than it. I suspect Winnington has told her something--measuring it chastely out. All the same--I shall see her again." * * * * * Meanwhile Delia was descending the hill pursued by doubts and terrors. The day was now darkening fast, and heavy snow-clouds were coming down over the valley. The wind had dropped, but the heavy air was bitter-cold and lifeless, as though the earth waited sadly for the silencing and muffling of the snow. And in Delia's heart there was a like dumb expectancy of change. The old enthusiasms, and ideals and causes, seemed for the moment to lie veiled and frozen within her. Only two figures emerged sharply in the landscape of thought--Gertrude--and Winnington. Since that day, the day before Weston's operation, when Paul Lathrop had brought her evidence--collected partly from small incidents and observations on the spot, partly from information supplied him by friends in London--which had sharpened all her own suspicions into certainties, she had never known an hour free from fear. Her letters had remained wholly unanswered. She did not even know where Gertrude was; though it seemed to her that letters addressed to the head office of the League of Revolt must have been forwarded. No! Gertrude was really planning this hateful thing; the destruction of this beautiful and historic house, with all its memories and its treasures, in order to punish a Cabinet Minister for his opposition to Woman Suffrage, and so terrorise others. Moreover it meant the risking of human life--Daunt--his children, complete indifference also to Delia's feelings, Delia's pain.