She was standing in the bathroom with her dress off, drying her neck and arms all fresh from the steaming water when the front door bell rang. She stared reassuringly up at herself in the little fixed mirror over the basin, for her heart seemed to have stopped. She heard the sound of her own blood winnowing in her ears, saw her eyes dilated and shining. And in that instant she knew she had come from marriage immune; she was giving herself as a sealed and virgin fountain into the hands of Louis. He, a man, might never know it, but it was true, and she was glad.

Flying back as she was, in her white petticoat and little white, sleeveless under-bodice, to the firelit room, she snatched the shawl off the couch and wrapped herself in it hurriedly. The bell in the basement pealed a second time. That it should sound a third time was not to be borne. A gay figure, she sped across the dark hall. Noiseless she went on stocking foot, trailing the long white fringes of the shawl behind her.

Yes, it was he! He had taken off his hat. As Joanna darted forward between the pillars which were like the trunks of beech-trees, she could see his shadow on the glass of the door. Against the thread-like, waving tangle of the laburnum, his head showed like a satyr’s, eager and suffering. His suffering pierced her breast like a joyous spear.

She opened to him, and in a close, speechless embrace they leaned against the inner side of the door till the catch went home. Louis knew without asking that they were alone together in the house.

But Joanna, drawing back for a moment, saw that in his face which she would never quite forget or forgive, a look of shame. In spite of all he had said to her, he was ashamed. There it was in his face warring with his delight, and by this dastard shame of his she herself for a moment was betrayed, was besmirched. True, it was only for a moment. In the radiance of her welcome and her giving the deadly thing passed from him. He became free, simple, exultant as herself. Still she had seen it; and all night it lurked like a foul wolf outside the room she had prepared, the firelit, secret room where the lovers were creatures of pure magic to each other.

Later, when she lay at rest in his hands, Joanna, still awake, was lapped strangely about by thoughts of death. Now death showed as beautiful to her as life, life as terrible as death. And she seemed to hold the secret of existence between her hollowed palms. It was a secret at once so stupendous and so simple that she wondered she had been so long of finding it out.