“I don’t feel--for him,” she went on with more passion, “the ordinary pity and sadness that one feels for any dead thing. I can’t--for him. There’s no dignity, no pathos in Death when it touches him. You mustn’t think me hard; mustn’t put this down to vengeance because he injured me. I can still feel pity. I cried only this morning over a tomtit which the cat had mangled. But I don’t cry for this. I don’t feel. I’m stone where he is concerned. Until to-night I have been wax. I’m not sorry or shocked; not anything womanly, anything human that I ought to be. I can’t feel. I’m free. Take me away. We’ll get warm in the house.” They stepped out into the driving snow. The world was white and pitiless that night. The door thudded solemnly when Jethro pulled it to. He had his arm round Pamela, his coat held out to form a screen for her. Midway to the house she stopped, the blinding, desolate snow whirling above their heads. She looked up and he looked down. There was a strange fire in each pair of eyes. Suddenly he stooped and kissed her on the mouth--roughly, brutally. Her mouth smarted with the rudeness of that kiss, but a sweet, permanent content ran through her body. He loved her! She would be Cousin Pamela no more, save in the tender jest of matrimony. He had always loved her. His reserve, his brotherly attitude, had been forced. They were part of his prudent nature, part of his hereditary economy. He would never expend when there was small chance of any result. The house was warm--a gently filtering warmth that seemed to wrap them directly they shut the door. The discreet clink of china, the savory smell of soup, came from the kitchen. They were preparing dinner--the place was wholly regardless of that miserable dead man. They shut themselves in the drawing-room. Pamela abandoned herself to the luxury of the fire. Jethro paced about nervously, his ears alert for wheels. “Egbert can do nothing,” he said. “The poor chap was dead when I found him--dead and stiff. He must have been in the pond some time. If I hadn’t found him to-night the ice would have pinned him in by to-morrow. We should have been obliged to cut him out. I can’t think how he got in. It isn’t dark: he never drank--too much. His head was strong. He could stand a lot of whisky. We don’t know----” “We shall never know,” she said with the oddest lethargy. All the time he walked about the room, indulging as he did so in kind commonplace reflections concerning Edred, she was saying to herself--lilting the words to a queer dancing air that hummed in her head: “Free, free, free.” She tried herself, probed herself, insisted on proving. She recalled all sorts of things--her happiest, tenderest moments with the dead man. She felt nothing at all, except faint disgust for the woman--it could not have been herself--who had so madly loved that creature who was lying in the barn searching the roof with his fixed, shallow eyes.