And following upon that came Anna. Anna had become an obsession to Katherine. If, in her earlier life, she had thought very intently of persons or countries remote from her, she would, perhaps, have known how to deal with the woman, but never before, in any crisis or impulse, had her imagination been stirred. If she had ever thought about imagination, she had decided that Rachel Seddon’s “Imagination!... you haven’t got a scrap, my dear!” hurled at her once in the middle of some dispute, was absolutely true. But her love for Philip had proved its preserver, had proved it, roused it, stirred it into a fierce, tramping monster, with whom she was simply unable to deal. If only, she felt, she had been able to speak of her to Philip! Surely then the questions and the answers would have stripped Anna of her romance, would have shown her to be the most ordinary of ordinary women, someone unworthy of Philip, unworthy of anyone’s dreams. But bringing Anna into the air had been forbidden—anything better than to start Philip thinking of her—so that there she had lingered, somewhere in the shadow, romantic, provoking, mocking, dangerous, coloured with all the show of her foreign land, with the towers and plains and rivers of romance. Nevertheless it had not been all Katherine’s imagination. There had been in the affair some other agency. Again and again Katherine had been conscious that, in opposition to her will, she was being driven to hunt for that figure. In the middle of some work or pleasure she would start, half frightened, half excited, conscious that someone was behind her, watching her. She would turn, and in the first flash of her glance it would seem to her that she caught some vanishing figure, the black hair, the thin, tall body, the laughing, mocking eyes. It was simply, she would tell herself, that her curiosity refused to be quiet. If only she might have known whether Philip thought of Anna, whether Anna thought of Philip, whether Anna wanted Philip to return to her, whether Anna really despised him, whether ... and then with a little shudder of dismissal, she would banish the Phantom, summoning all her admirable Trenchard common-sense to her aid.... “That was past, that was gone, that was dead.” She was, upon this afternoon, at the point of summoning this resolution when the door opened and Millie came in. For a moment so dark was the room that she could not see, and cried: “Katie, are you there?” “Yes. Here by the window.” Millie came across the room and stood by Katherine’s chair. In her voice there was the shadow of that restraint that there had been now between them ever since the Sunday with the Awful Supper. “It’s only the Post. It’s just come. Two letters for you—one from Philip that I thought that you’d like to have.” Katherine took the letters, laid them on her lap, looking up at her sister with a little smile.