Coming to a bridge, she stood leaning over the parapet as if to find a refuge in the steadiness, the simplicity, of flowing water. The air was laden with sun and dust. The leaden sunshine weighed everything down. Only on the water was it pointed with silver. From an opening far up in a flour mill, men were loading a barge with sacks. The sacks were sent flying down two very long planks which, bending under their own slim weight, reached from the high doorway to the deck of the barge.

When she had gazed awhile, still in that strange helplessness of receptivity, one of the men who was in the barge helping to pile up the sacks, noticed her. He rubbed the sweat from his forehead with his arm, smiling intently up at her; and must have said a word to his mates, for they too looked up amid their cloud of flour and stopped working for a moment.

And Joanna, before she drifted on, treasured their gazes like a farewell. A dreadful sense of approaching death was upon her. She was looking her last on the world in which she had lived till now – was severing all human contacts one by one. Already her body seemed near to dissolution.

In absolute terror she entered a church and knelt down. She had not even realized that it was the cathedral. Mechanical with fear, she began to repeat the prayers of childhood. “This night I lay me …” she began: then prayed for her mother, for Georgie, Linnet and Sholto. “Bless poor Mario, bless my Louis, bless Lawrence … Help me to be good!” she murmured swiftly. And so that she might include enemies in her blessing, she tried to bring in Mrs. Pender’s name. “May we all have what is best for our souls and bodies,” she concluded, using a phrase she had heard a thousand times on her mother’s lips.

Suddenly then, as she cowered in the dark and lofty cathedral, it seemed to Joanna that she saw the Lord on His throne. And that He was preparing to answer her prayer for herself, not with His smile but with His sword. She could feel beforehand the stab that would destroy her. But she would not shrink. Rather would she lift up her breast to receive it. If it was God’s will to slay her, then must she be slain. Not for nothing was she Juley Erskine’s daughter.

VIII

She had been more than half an hour in the station when the train from London came in.

At the sight of her lover leaning from the carriage window looking out for her, all her fears, all she had just gone through, became absurd. Here was the old solid world claiming her. She could still cling to it. She rushed forward, and Louis came in his rather fussy way to meet her.