She looked up at him; in her face there was an inattention to the present, an inattention to what he was saying. Her eyes scanned his features with a sort of slow wonder. But it was a wonder at herself. "You had better see that the windows are closed," said Paul. "There's going to be a change of wind." XVI. Eve's cheeks showed a deep rose bloom; she was no longer the snow-white woman whom near-sighted Miss Sabrina had furtively scanned upon her arrival at Romney six months before. She was still markedly erect, but her step had become less confident, her despotic manner had disappeared. Often now she was irresolute, and she had grown awkward--a thing new with her; she did not know how to arrange her smallest action, hampered by this new quality. But since the terrible hour when Ferdie had appeared at the end of the corridor with his candle held aloft and his fixed eyes, life with her had rushed along so rapidly that she had seemed to be powerless in its current. The first night in Paul's cottage, in her little room next to Cicely's, she had spent hours on her knees by the bedside pouring forth in a flood of gratitude to Some One, Somewhere--she knew no formulas of prayer--that she had been delivered from the horror that had held her speechless through all the long journey. Ferdie was living! She repeated it over and over--Ferdie was living! At the time there had been no plan; she had stepped back into her room to get the pistol, not with any purpose of attack, but in order not to be without some means of defence. The pistol was one of Jack's, which she had found and taken possession of soon after her arrival, principally because it had been his; she had seen him with it often; with it he himself had taught her to shoot. Then at the last, when Jack's poor little boy had climbed up by the boat's seat, and the madman had made that spring towards him, then she had--done what she did. She had done it mechanically; it had seemed the only thing to do. But, once away, the horror had come, as it always does and must, when by violence a human life has been taken. She had dropped the pistol into the Sound, but she could not drop the ghastly picture of the dark figure on the sand, with its arms making two or three spasmodic motions, then becoming suddenly still. Was he dead? If he was, she, Eve Bruce, was a murderer, a creature to be imprisoned for life,--hanged. How people would shrink from her if they knew! And how monstrous it was that she should touch Cicely! Yet she must. Cain, where is thy brother? And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him. Would it come to this, that she should be forced at last to take her own life, in order to be free from the horror of murder? These were the constant thoughts of that journey northward, without one moment's respite day or night.