The scene on the road became sinister: she remembered the strange silence of the trees and the clangorous barking of the dogs, the hoarse voices from the encampment in the hollow. It had been very dark there and an extraordinary blackness had buried her when she was in that man’s arms. It had been dark, too, on the hill, but with a feeling of space and height and freedom. If Charles had been a little different—but then, he did not really want her; he was making a study of his sorrow, he was gazing at it, turning it round and over, growing familiar with all its aspects. He was an artist frustrated of any power but this of feeling and to have given him herself would simply have been to rob him of what he found more precious. But she and Francis Sales were kin; she understood him: he was not better than herself, perhaps he was not so good and he, too, was unhappy, but he did not love her for those qualities of which Charles Batty had talked by the Monks’ Pool, he wove no poetry about her: he loved her because she was pretty; because her mouth was red and her eyes bright and her body young: he loved her because, being her father’s daughter, her youth answered his desire with enough shame to season appetite, but not to spoil it. And she thought of Christabel as of some sick doll. Dinner was a strange meal that night. Caroline’s chair was empty, and the sighs of Sophia were like gentle zephyrs in the room. Henrietta’s silence might have been interpreted as anxiety about her aunt and Susan informed the cook, truly enough, that Miss Henrietta had a feeling heart. It was only Rose who could have explained the nature of the feeling. She was fascinated by the sight of Henrietta, her rival, her fellow dupe. Rose looked at her without envy or malice or covetousness, but with an extraordinary interest, trying to find what likeness to herself and what differences had attracted Francis Sales. There was the dark hair, curly where hers was straight, dark eyes instead of grey ones, the same warm pallor of the skin, in Henrietta’s case slightly overlaid with pink; but the mouth, ah! it must be the mouth and what it meant that made the alluring difference. Henrietta’s mouth was soft, red and mutinous; in her father it had been a blemish, half hidden by the foreign cut of moustache and beard, but in Henrietta it was a beauty and a warning. Rose had never properly studied that mouth before and under the fixity of her gaze Henrietta’s eyelids fluttered upwards. There were shadows under her eyes and it seemed to Rose that she had changed a little. She must have changed. Rose had never been in the arms of Francis Sales; she shuddered now at the thought, but she knew that she, too, would have been different after that experience.