She would go and sit under the shelter of one of the many unemployed machines--for only a few daring spirits would follow Sally's example to-day--and try to think it out. Just a few instructions to Mrs. Lobjoit, and a word or two of caution to Gerry not to fall over cliffs, or to get run over at level-crossings or get sunstrokes, or get cold, etc., and she would fall back on her own society and think.... Yes, that was the question! Might she not lose him again? And if she did, how live without him?... Oh yes, she would be no worse off than before, in a certain sense. She would have Sally still ... but.... Which would be the worse? The loss of the husband whom every day taught her to love more dearly, or the task of explaining the cause of her loss to Sally? The one she fixed her mind on always seemed intolerable. As for the other contingencies--difficulties of making all clear to friends, and so forth--let them go; they were not worth a thought. But she _must_ be beforehand, and know how to act, how to do her best to avert both, if the thing she dreaded came to pass.... There now! Here she was settled under the lee of a machine--happily the shadow-side, for the sun was warm--and the white foam of the undertow was guilty of a tremendous glare--the one the people who can't endure the seaside get neuralgia from--and Sally was going to come out of the second machine directly in the Turkey-twill knickers, and find her way through the selvage-wave and the dazzle, or get knocked down and have to try back. Surely Rosalind, instead of saying over and over again that she _must_ be ready to meet the coming evil, possibly close at hand, ought to make a serious effort to become so. She found herself, even at this early hour of the day, tired with the strain of a misgiving that an earthquake was approaching; and as those who have lived through earthquakes become unstrung at every slightest tremor of the earth's crust beneath them, so she felt that the tension begun with that recurrence of two days ago had grown and grown, and threatened to dominate her mind, to the exclusion of all else. Every little thing, such as the look on her husband's face half an hour ago, made her say to herself, as the earthquake-haunted man says at odd times all through the day and night, "Is this _it_? Has it come?" and she saw before her no haven of peace. What was it now she really most feared? Simply the effect of the revelation on her husband's mind--an effect no human creature could make terms with. She was not the least afraid of anything he could say or do, delirium apart; but see what delirium had made of him--she was sure it was so--in that old evil hour when he had flung her from him and gone away in anger to try to get her sentence of banishment ratified. How could she guard against a repetition, in some form or other, of the disastrous errors of that unhappy time?