Here was the burden of Trissie’s lament. Here, in the steady incorrigible tracking down by misfortune. It was Edwin whom the pursuing furies had marked for their pray. She, Trissie, had been born – she was sure of it – for good fortune. She had always been known as a lucky person, and was convinced she would be still, were it not for Edwin. It was Edwin who had spoiled her life, who had cheated her of her happiness, who had brought upon her one trouble after another. And he had done it in all innocence. Therein lay his offence. Any wickedness – again and again Trissie wildly repeated this phrase – any wickedness, she could have forgiven him. For then she could have cut herself off from him. If he were a guilty man, she could have gone free, been happy (once, just before the birth of Roddy she had tried to leave him, and he had told her she was free to do the best for herself). But he was an innocent man. It was only that fate had marked him as a prey. And how could she leave this Jonah, this victim, this man set apart for vengeance, by whose side nothing could prosper?

So the wife raved and wept.

But on the day of the burial, Joanna came nearer to the true heart of the mystery.

In the church, and afterwards by the graveside, she saw how the strange couple clung each to the other. And there was that in their clinging which was more than the ordinary holding together for comfort of married mourners. To Joanna it seemed to proclaim their secret from the housetops. The Moons, like Phemie and Jimmie, possessed what she in her own unfulfilled being must envy.

IV

Now she would have to go back to her own life.

But the day before, it had seemed as if she might live only in Trissie’s life and in entire devotion to Trissie’s unhappiness. Now she knew that Trissie did not need her. The husband and wife had cast her out by the grave. She had no part with them. She must go on again alone with what was no longer a life, but only a dying and a denial.

So it was that in the weeks that followed, Roddy’s death ceased to cause her any personal grief. It became merely another incident in the recession of all life from her. For days on end she was shorn of herself, shorn of the world, shorn of the old assured existence for which her mother at one end, and Louis at the other, had supremely stood. She was denuded even of the warm and exquisite fleece of memory. She had no past, no living present, no conceivable future. But under all her deathliness was one grain of faith that death must be fulfilled to the uttermost before any new birth can be. She lay abandoned, waiting in a perfection of emptiness.

V