She stopped a moment beneath the gently dripping trees and took off her knitted cap and shook it dry, for she had inadvertently brushed against an overhanging branch on which last summer's leaves still wetly clung. She pulled out her handkerchief and rubbed her cap thoughtfully. It had been raining all the morning, and now late in the afternoon the garden was a quiet grey place of fallen leaves and gathering dusk and occasional small shakings of wet off the trees when a silent bird perched on the sodden branches. Some drops fell on her bare head while she was drying her cap. She put up her hand mechanically and rubbed them off. She stood wiping her cap long after it was dry, absorbed in thought. "I don't know what it is," she said presently, half aloud, "but I do know what it isn't." She put on her cap again, pulling it over her ears with both hands and much care, and staring while she did it at a slug in the path in front of her. "And what it isn't," she said after another interval, shaking her head and screwing up her face into an expression of profoundest negation, "is love." "_Well_," she added, deeply astonished. Then, with a flash of insight, "It's because he works." Then, with a quick desire to cover up the wound to her vanity, "If he didn't get lost in his work he'd _remember_ he loves me--it's only that he _forgets_." Then, with a white flare of candour, "He's a bigger thing than I am." Then, with the old eagerness to help, "So it's my business to see that he can be big in happy peace." Then, remembrance smiting her with its flat, cold hand, "But he _is_ happy." Then, "So where do I come in?" Then, with a great, frank acceptance of the truth, "I don't come in." Then, swept by swift, indignant honesty, "Why should I _want_ to come in? What is all this coming in? Oh"--she stamped her foot--"the simple fact, the naked fact when I've pulled all the silly clothes off, is that I only want him to be happy if it's I who make him happy, and I'm nothing but a--I'm just a--" She twisted round on her heels, her arms flung out, in search of the exact raw word--"I'm nothing but just a common tyrant." At tea-time her condition can best, though yet imperfectly, be described as chastened. CHAPTER XXV Nevertheless, though she tried to face it squarely and help herself by indignation at her own selfish vanity, she felt a great emptiness round her, a great chill.