Meanwhile Livia was deciding that she certainly had made a mistake, unless she could, after all, succeed in getting her own way; and to do that she would have to take things into her own hands, much more positively than she had yet done. She would walk with him when it was fine, because there was nothing else to do. Once they walked out to the surprising remains of the abbey of Mont-Major, and it began to rain, and they lingered uncomfortably about the ruins and in the subterranean chapel. She walked back with him, nursing a fine hatred in silence. She turned it over in her heart, and it grew and gathered, like a snowball rolled over and over in the snow. It was comprehensive and unreasoning, and it forgot the small grievance out of which it rose, in a sense of the vast grievance into which it had swollen. To Roserra such moods, which were now becoming frequent, were unintelligible, and he suffered from them like one who has to find his way through a camp of his enemies in the dark. When they got back to the house, Livia would silently take up a book and sit motionless for hours, turning over the pages without raising her eyes, or showing a consciousness of his presence. He pretended to do the same, but his eyes wandered continually, and he had to read every page twice over. He wanted to speak, but never knew what to say, when she was in this prickly state of irritation. To her, his critical way of waiting, and doing nothing, became an oppression. And his silence, and what she supposed to be his indifference, grew upon her like a heavy weight, until the silent woman, who sat there reading sullenly, felt the impulse to rise and fling away the book, and shriek aloud. Livia did not say that she wished to go away from Arles, anywhere from Arles, but the desire spoke in all her silences. She made no complaint, but Roserra saw an unfriendliness growing up in her eyes which terrified him. She held him, as she had held him since their first meeting, by a kind of magnetism which he had come to realise was neither love nor sympathy. He felt that he could hate her, and yet not free himself from that influence. What was to be done? He would have to choose; his life of the future could no longer be his life of the past. His introduction of a woman to his best friend had been unfortunate, as such introductions always are, in one way or another. He had tended his soul for more than half a lifetime, waited upon it delicately, served it with its favourite food; and now something stronger had come forward and said: No more. What was it? He had no wish to speculate; it mattered little whether it was what people called his higher nature, or what they called his lower nature, which had brought him to this result. At least he had some recompense.