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watching her with a piercing grey attention, and his shadowed, cold, distinguished face would wear a secret, sly, absorbed expression, very peculiar. It made Anna uncomfortable. She was embarrassed without knowing why, and stayed longer in the water than she would otherwise have done. But growing chilled, she had to climb out over the wet, slippery rocks to sit down in the sun.
    But always some distance away from her father, not close to him, near the cherry tree, as would have been natural. Till one day he came to where she was sitting like a young brown nymph with her arms clasped round her knees, and touched her, just stealthily touched her wet shoulder. Anna would have liked to jump away from the stealthy touch; but she was ashamed to do that. So she sat still, very tense and uncomfortable, while James Forrester’s hand moved down her arm with the strangest, softest, most disturbing touch imaginable. Then raised itself and touched, just lightly touched with bent fingers the cool curve of her neck where tiny runnels of water were still creeping from her wet hair. This was too much for Anna; this sinister, slight touch on the sensitive skin of her neck was more than she could endure. She sprang up quicklyand ran away to hide herself in the woods. She did not know what she was hiding from. But after that she no longer wanted to bathe in the bright pool.
    She avoided her father as much as possible these days. The meals that they had together in the big, dark, barren room were a trial to her. She began to dislike the room, so rough and empty and severely neat, with the curtains that Miss Wilson had sewed, years before, still hanging, limp and faded, at the high windows. Then the food: the endless, monotonous, hot, greasy stews and bits of boiled meat, and old Seguela flopping back and forward from the kitchen in meaningless haste, like some stupid, clumsy bird.
    And at the other end of the table sat James, looking like a dead statesman, with his grey face blank and dead, and his thoughts very far away.
    He drank a good deal at times. But the alcohol did not seem to affect him. His stony expression never changed. But sometimes a strange, flashing glance from his cold eyes would rest upon Anna, full of some burning fierceness that was like hatred, and he would force her to drink with him, force her to swallow the little glassful of fiery spirit at a single gulp.
    ‘I ought to shoot you, really,’ he said to her once, in a dead voice. ‘Conscientiously, it would be the best thing for me to do.’
    She saw from the grave concentration of his face that his conscience did actually require him to kill her. And this puzzled her because she could not understand why her death should be a conscientious necessity. The thought of being shot did not seem to cause her any concern.
    ‘Why? Why ought you to shoot me?’ she asked, looking at him with earnest, faithful, unfaltering eyes, very anxious to understand.
    But instead of answering her question, he stared at her for a long time, tracing with his thin fingers an imaginary circle upon the table. Then suddenly he was still, and on his face there came a fanatical, fixed look, like a possession.
    ‘There is only one thing in life of any importance, and that is complete honesty,’ he said. ‘Honesty with oneself. The truth. Complete, stark, final honesty.’
    Anna wondered if he would kill her. And once more she realized that she didn’t mind what happened to her as long as he willed it; she even didn’t mind dying if that was what he wanted. In spite of everything.
    The weather grew hot and thundery. Great masses of cloud banked themselves behind the mountains. The air ran hot with electricity. There was no breath of wind. Anna could not bear the threatening quiet, the threat of electric devilment in the stillness. She went down to the chestnut-forest to search for a little breeze.
    But there was none. Only, after a time, came old Seguela running, flapping grotesquely down the