The sun was sinking low towards the west, disappearing in a crimson glory which reflected its red glow in their faces, and splashed the girl's white skirt with vivid colour. She stared at the dying splendour of the day with discontented eyes, which read in the vision of this royal withdrawal the melancholy inevitableness of destiny,--the futility of striving against the combined forces of nature and habit and inclination. Why, as Arnott argued, should one refuse what life offered from some unprofitable idea of right? Life had offered her so little: the only gladness she had known came to her through this man's disloyal affection. Nothing could result from their intercourse. Already it caused her more pain than pleasure. But the unwholesome flattery of his attentions held her captive to the intoxicating excitement of the senses. Each new licence he permitted himself, against which she offered the vain resistance of a half-heartened remonstrance, left her more unguarded to his persistent attack. She despised herself for accepting his caresses, for allowing him to talk to her as he did. Always she resolved that each time should be the last; and on the next occasion she yielded to him again. When the mind becomes subordinated to the senses moral victory is impossible. "Let us rest here a while," Arnott said. He drew her aside from the road, and spread his coat for her under the shade of a tree. He seated himself beside her, and smoked and talked disconnectedly about himself,--of the aimlessness of his life, of his unrealised hopes, his disappointments, and the unsatisfying nature of his married life. He did not speak to her of love; he contented himself with trying to arouse her sympathy, and to place the disloyalty of his conduct in a less condemnatory light. He was the misunderstood, unappreciated husband, whose sole function in his wife's eyes was to provide her with the agreeable and comfortable things of life. If this description was not altogether consistent with the home life as she had observed it when she first came to live with them, Blanche ascribed the discrepancy to her want of perception, or to the decent deceptions he had practised in order to keep up before the world a pretence of domestic amiability. She was convinced he was quite sincere in what he told her. He was, as a matter of fact, talking himself into a belief in Pamela's coldness. He began to feel genuinely sorry for himself in the role of the unappreciated husband divorced from the sympathies of an indifferent wife. Pamela was indifferent of late, he reflected; she had grown strangely independent of him.