whom she might touch and care for with all the tenderness that had been wasted upon John Conyngham. She saw him as a lonely man who wanted one thing above all else from a woman, and that was understanding; and it was tenderness that she wanted to give him more than all else on earth. In the midst of her grief and fury, she meant to have him for her own. It seemed to her suddenly that it was only possible to free him from that terrible woman by sacrificing herself. If she gave herself—soul and body and heart—to Philip, she could save him. "He is mine," she kept sobbing, half-aloud. "He is mine . . . my own dear Philip." Why (she asked herself) should she care at all for gossip, for the sacrifice of her own pride, for all the tangle that was certain to follow? He needed her, though she doubted whether the fact had ever occurred to him, and she needed him, and it had been so ever since they were children, and would be so when they were old. All at once she felt a sudden terror of growing old. She seemed to feel the years rushing by her. She knew that she could not go on thus until she died.
And after a little while, when her sobbing had quieted a little, she began to see the thing more coldly. She saw even that Philip was fantastic and hopeless, trying to escape as much from himself as from his mother and from Naomi. She saw even that he was impossible. She doubted whether there was in him the chance of happiness. Yet none of it made any difference, for those were the very reasons perhaps why she loved him. They were the reasons too, perhaps, why at least three women—his mother, his wife and herself—had found themselves in a hopeless tangle over him. It was simply that without knowing it he made
