Together they went into the ball-room, where faces, still smiling their response to some jest spoken a moment earlier, seemed out of touch with reality. This colour, this light on chin and throat, this flash of jewels and gleaming of shirt-fronts, was as a picture in oils that had hung unnoticed while life pursued its course swiftly, and to which, now there was breathing space, attention had reluctantly returned. CHAPTER VIII THE NET On Sunday, John and Ordith were much with Margaret, and even when she contrived to be alone she found she could not exclude them from her mind. To think of either was disquieting, and she needed peace. She felt that John was watching her. He knew how she needed help and was eager to render it would she but indicate a means. Her failure to indicate it was being interpreted by him as a lack of trust for which he blamed himself. He could not understand, his eyes said continually, what he had done or left undone that repelled her confidence. And that he should attribute her silence to a fault in himself added to her uneasiness. She could not speak her mind to him; she could not ask him to help her with a problem the terms of which were not yet clear to herself. She felt that he was waiting for her to speak, and reproaching himself with some dullness or hardness that, as he imagined, was sealing her lips. Several times she tried to speak--if only to tell him that she was aware of his sympathy; but words would not come. Moreover--and this itself was an element in her difficulty--was not John weak with her own weakness? Together they were set about by forces stronger, infinitely stronger, than themselves. There was comradeship in that, but not help. It was as if they were two children side by side in a darkness that contained a menace, of which both were in different measures conscious, but which neither was able to grapple or even to define.