“Because one man insults you, dear, it is all the more reason that I should love and shield you. That part of your life is dead now. You said yourself this letter was the end. Let it be so, Clytie.” His delicacy and tenderness moved her very deeply. Womanlike, she had wanted him to read the paper, and yet loved him all the more for not having done so. The letter was her own note to Thornton, which he had returned with “You can go to the devil!” scrawled across it. The sheer brutality had made her lose, as it were, her self-respect, had presented her to her own eyes as a thing of naught, unworthy of the reverential love that Kent brought her. How could she honestly be to him the brightest and noblest of women with that scrawled thing dragging her down? Accordingly his actions and words gladdened her. She looked up at him, and he read as in some magical book the spell of tenderness that swam in her eyes. Then he threw himself on his knees before her and buried his face in her lap. “Oh, my love, my love!” And, stirred to her depths with a passionate thrill that was like a great pain, she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him. CHAPTER XXVII. Two years passed, outwardly uneventful, yet momentous in the development of inner life. Her marriage sometimes appeared to Clytie as a far-away episode, a kind of dream state in which she had been invested with a strange, unrealisable personality. Yet influences had remained, impulses had been awakened, that could not again lie dormant; knowledge had come to her that could not lapse into oblivion, leaving no trace behind. In her daily intercourse with Kent her nature expanded. It lost imperceptibly that vein of hardness which her struggle for self-development had fostered, and the disillusions and repugnances of her marriage had gradually been strengthening. Except in a brief interval of intoxication she had never known the woman's sweetness of surrender. The great triumph of surrender had never even then been hers. And this was gradually making itself felt in her heart during the two years that passed from the time of leaving her husband's roof.