It was this knowledge that made her distrust herself as utterly as if her own soul and spirit had just been introduced to her among a crowd of strangers. She had thought she had known herself, and now this thing had started out upon her as if she had been asleep in a dark room, and had been wakened to find the chamber blazing with lights. Whether she had the will or the strength to resist she did not yet know; the purpose alone she could utterly answer for. But she realized that if again she saw him in such sort as she had seen him on the Sunday afternoon by the river, or on that afternoon when she had told him of her conversation with Maud Brereton, it would be a more difficult task to make him keep silence. She felt she could scarcely answer for her own silence. How much less, then, for her power of stopping the speech which a word from her would have even then brought to utterance! And now---- She rose, feeling that the only hope of victory lay in turning away from thoughts like these, and not, under the specious pretext of consciously fighting them, in reality making them familiar to her mind; for familiarity in such things breeds, not contempt, but acquiescence, half contemptuous it may be, but half consenting, and she knew that in face of certain temptations it is cowardice not to run away. The sun was already off the lawn, and a cooler breeze had begun to stir the intense heat of the afternoon. Tea had long been waiting for her under the cedar, and she walked slowly along the terrace and down the ten steps which led on to the lawn. This terrace had been an expensive whim of Jack's grandfather; it ran the length of the house, and was paved and balustraded with rose-coloured Numidian marble; urns, wreathed in delicate creepers which spilt splashes of vivid colour, stood at intervals along it; and below it blossomed a superb riband flower-bed bordering the lawn where stood the cedar.