When he had gone and she was alone, for a terrible time she fought her defeat. She knew now quite clearly that her ruling passion during all these months had not been, as she had supposed, her love of Katherine, but her hatred of Philip. From the first moment of seeing him she had known him for her enemy. He had been, although at the time she had not realised it, the very figure whose appearance, all her life, she had dreaded; that figure, from outside, of whose coming Timothy had long ago prophesied. How she had hated him! From the very first she had made her plans, influencing the others against him, watching how she might herself most securely influence him against himself, breaking in his will, using Katherine against him; finally, when Seymour had told her the scandal, how she had treasured it up for the moment when he, because of his love for Katherine, should be completely delivered over to her! And the moment had come. She had had her triumph! She had seen his despair in his eyes! She had got him, she thought, securely for ever and ever. Then how she had known what she would do in the future, the slave that she would make of him, the ways that she would trouble him with Katherine, with that Russian woman, with Aggie, with all of them! Ah! it had been so perfect! and—at the very moment of her triumph—he had escaped! That love for Katherine that had been a true motive in her earlier life, a true motive even until six months ago, was now converted into a cold, implacable resentment, because it was Katherine who had opened the door of Philip’s cage. Strange the complexities of the human heart! That very day, as she won her triumph she had loved her daughter. She had thought: “Now that I have beaten him I can take you back to my heart. We can be, my dear, as we used to be”—but now, had Katherine entered the room, she would have been spurned, dismissed for ever. In the lust of love there is embedded, as the pearl is embedded in its shell, a lust of hate. Very closely they are pressed together. Mrs. Trenchard was beaten—beaten by her daughter, by a new generation, by a new world, by a new age—beaten in the very moment of her victory. She would never forgive. What was left to her? Her heart was suddenly empty of love, of hatred, of triumph, of defeat. She was tired and lonely. Somewhere, dimly, from the passage, the cuckoo-clock proclaimed the hour. The house! That at least was left to her. These rooms, these roofs, the garden, the village, the fields, the hedges the roads to the sea. The Place had not deceived her, had not shared in the victory over her; it had, rather, shared in her defeat. It seemed, as she stood there, to come up to her, to welcome her, to console her. She put a shawl over her shoulders, went softly through the dark passages, down into the drawing-room.