He could not think what life would be like without Gertrude, any more than he could think what it would be like with her in a closer and more intimate relation. For none of them had ever suggested that he should marry Gertrude. No Brodrick would have dreamed of marrying his housekeeper. Gertrude would not have dreamed of it herself. And yet she dreamed. But her dream was of continuance in the silent, veiled adventure, the mystery and religion of her service. Service to Brodrick, perpetual, unwearying service, constituted to her mind the perfect tie. It was the purity of it that she counted as perfection. She desired nothing further than her present surrender to the incorruptible, inassailable passion of service. Whenever, in her dream, she touched the perilous edges of devotion, Gertrude had pulled herself back. She had told herself that she was there for nothing in the world but to save Brodrick, to save him trouble, to save him worry, to save him expense; to save and save and save. That was really what it came to when she saved him from having to keep a secretary. For Gertrude lived and moved and had her sentimental being in Brodrick. Thus she had laboured at her own destruction. So preoccupied was she with the thought of Brodrick that her trouble, travelling along secret paths of the nerves and brain, had subtly, insensibly communicated itself to him. He grew restless in that atmosphere of unrest. If Gertrude could have kept, inwardly, her visible beautiful serenity, Brodrick, beguiled by the peace she wrapped him in, might have remained indefinitely quiescent. But he had become the centre of a hundred influences, wandering spirits of Gertrude's brain. Irresistibly urging, intangibly irritating, perpetually suggesting, they had prepared him for the dominion of Jane Holland. But Gertrude was not aware of this. Her state, which had begun within a few months of her arrival, remained for three years a secret to herself. She was before all things a sentimentalist, and she had the sentimentalist's monstrous innocence and boundless capacity for illusion. She shuddered in the grip of mortal renunciation, and called her state holy, when adoration and desire were fused in a burning beatitude at the approach of Brodrick. In her three years' innocence she continued unaware that her emotions had any root in flesh and blood; and Brodrick was not the man to enlighten her. His attitude was such as to nourish and perpetuate her beautiful serenity.