He could not go on like this for ever, he said. He saw her once a week for a few minutes, if he was lucky: how could she expect him to be satisfied with that? It was little enough, she owned, but more than it might have been. She could never make him admit, perhaps because he did not feel, how greatly they were blessed; but she saw herself as the guardian of a temple: she stood in the doorway forbidding him to enter less the place should be defiled, yet forbidding him in such a way that he should not love her less. Yet constantly saying “No,” constantly shaking the head and smiling propitiatingly the while is not to appease; and those short hours of companionship in which they had once managed to be happy became times of strain, of disappointment, of barely kept control. “I wish I could stop loving you,” he broke out one day, “but I can’t. You’re the kind one doesn’t forget. I thought I’d done it once, for a few months, but you came back—you, came back.” She smiled, seeming aloof and full of some wisdom unknown to him. She knew he could not do without her, still more she knew he must not do without her, and these certainties became the main fabric of her love. She had to keep him, less for her own sake than for that of her idea, but gradually the severe rules she had made became relaxed. They were not to meet except on that one day a week demanded by Christabel, who also had to keep Francis happy and who would have welcomed the powers of darkness to relieve the monotony of her own life; but Rose could hardly take a ride without meeting Francis, also riding; or he would appear, on foot, out of a wood, out of a side road, and waylay her. He seemed to have an uncanny knowledge of her presence, and they would have a few minutes of conversation, or of a silence which was no longer beautiful, but terrible with effort, with possibilities and with dread.