And Tom Merivale was dead! Ah, what was happening to the world? Was happiness being slowly withdrawn from it, leaving misery only there? It seemed indeed as if sorrow, like some dreadful initiation, had to be submitted to by everyone, even those who appeared to have been born in the royal purple of happiness. How much had come into her own immediate circle in so short a time! To Merivale it had come in so blinding and overwhelming a flood that it had killed him who had radiated happiness. To Evelyn, it had come, blinding, also, and that cruel stroke, more cruel because it was so illogical, like the blasting of the tree by lightning down in the Forest, had stricken her, too, and had not perhaps dealt its worst blow yet. It had come to Philip through her in a way perhaps not less illogical. For it was not in her to control love or not to love; her meeting with Evelyn, her loving him, was as much an accident as the descent of the lightning-flash or the scattering of the lead pellets. Yet Philip had not died, and though he might have said that his life was wrecked, that all that remained for him was hatred and despair, he had struggled to shore, he stood there now strong and unembittered, and held out his hands to her. He had learned something it seemed from these accidents. He had learned, perhaps, not to call them accidents. Was he right? Were these vague lines part of a pattern, of a design so huge that she could not yet see it was a design at all? Madge had forgotten about her breakfast; it lay still untasted, while she mused with wide eyes. And as this struck her, she stood up and pushed her plate from her. Greatly as she had grown in human strength and tenderness, since that day so few weeks ago, when she had promised to marry Philip, she felt now suddenly like a little child, who wanted to be led. There were dark places, she knew, before her. She must try not to be frightened, she must realise that there was nothing to be frightened about. And thus, feebly, hesitatingly, she put out her hand. [Illustration: text decoration] TWENTY-SECOND Evelyn woke that morning out of one of those cruel, dreamless sleeps that seem for a little while on waking to have expunged all memory, and he lay a few minutes conscious vaguely of something a little wrong, but for the moment not knowing where he was, and not caring to make the effort to guess. Then suddenly, like the stroke of a black wing across the sky, memory came home for the day. Whenever he woke in the hereafter he would awake to that, to his maimed, ruined life. The knowledge of it was more unbearable to-day than it had been yesterday; to-morrow it would be worse; it would keep growing worse. Then out of that utter darkness there grew a little light. It might have been even more desperate--how was that? Then he remembered Madge. She had seen, and the worst of all that he had imagined was not true.