I switched on the elephant-lamp and lay staring up at the damp-marks on the blotchy ceiling.

I felt like a child at a pantomime who, while contentedly watching the fairy grotto behind the rose-petalled gauze, suddenly sees it ripped to shreds and blown into ragged tatters before his very eyes to have revealed before him a hideous black landscape of writhen trees, towering crags and wheeling ravens.

The land of the wizards and witches lay before me. Sulphur trailed in the air, silent lightning forked into the dark chasms. There was no thunder. Silence, fear.

The reason for this? Reason a-plenty, for no wizard, no witch, stood dead centre in this evil scene. Glowing, with the force of atomic light, stood a white and gold creature, so brilliant, so dazzling, that a great aura of light trembled all about it, giving the impression that the figure was imprisoned in a gigantic white and gold sea anemone, a surging, pulsing, weaving halo of evil.

It was James.

Love had not awakened me; but fear had. I knew, I suppose for the very first time, that something which I had suppressed all my life had quite suddenly broken through my years of restraint and reserve. As certainly as I knew that I had fallen in love with Florence, I knew that I hated – and always had done – James. The years of envy, of jealousy, of simple dislike and mistrust, had, like the flesh of the oyster, absorbed the grain of sand, the symbol in my case for hate, and had turned it into the pearl of indifference, casualness, apparent brotherly love. Uninterested, remote, but agreeable when called upon to be so.

The lace-curtained window had suddenly released demons in me, had given me strength, the strength to take from him that which had been his. That which he had so cruelly used. I could, and I would, make up to Florence for the brutality of his malign seed. By taking over his shirked responsibility, the monstrous lolling head, the bewilderment of a deserted, not-even-married woman who had loved unheeded. He had gone of his own volition, so let it rest there. Let him go. Why bother to search for him? To question and to look? In time, for time will heal, he will be a memory, and I would do all I could do to redress the pain and the distress.