She sprang forward, and stopped short, at gaze, frozen.

The man sat up, propping himself on his hands and looked at her, a wavering smile on his lips.  He began to speak, a thick, unmodulated voice, as though his throat were stiff.  “Comingtomeetyou,” he articulated very rapidly and quite unintelligibly, “an ’countered hill in driveway ... no hill in driveway, and climbed and climbed”—­he lost himself in repetition and brought up short to begin again, “—­labor so ’cessive had to rest—­”

Sylvia turned a paper-white face on her companion.  “What’s the matter with him?” she tried to say, but Page only saw her lips move.  He made no answer.  That she would know in an instant what was the matter flickered from her eyes, from her trembling white lips; that she did know, even as she spoke, was apparent from the scorn and indignation which like sheet-lightning leaped out on him.  “Arnold!  For shame!  Arnold!  Think of Judith!”

At the name he frowned vaguely as though it suggested something extremely distressing to him, though he evidently did not recognize it.  “Judish?  Judish?” he repeated, drawing his brows together and making a grimace of great pain.  “What’s Judish?”

And then, quite suddenly the pain and distress were wiped from his face by sodden vacuity.  He had hitched himself to one of the poplars, and now leaned against this, his head bent on his shoulder at the sickening angle of a man hanged, his eyes glassy, his mouth open, a trickle of saliva flowing from one corner.  He breathed hard and loudly.  There was nothing there but a lump of uncomely flesh.

Sylvia shrank back from the sight with such disgust that she felt her flesh creep.  She turned a hard, angry face on Page.  “Oh, the beast!  The beast!” she cried, under her breath.  She felt defiled.  She hated Arnold.  She hated life.

Page said quietly:  “You’ll excuse my not going with you to the house?  I’ll have my car and chauffeur here in a moment.”  He stepped away quickly and Sylvia turned to flee into the house.

But something halted her flying feet.  She hesitated, stopped, and pressed her hands together hard.  He could not be left alone there in the driveway.  A car might run over him in the dusk.  She turned back.

She stood there, alone with the horror under the tree.  She turned her back on it, but she could see nothing but the abject, strengthless body, the dreadful ignominy of the face.  They filled the world.

And then quickly—­everything came quickly to Sylvia—­there stood before her the little boy who had come to see them in La Chance so long ago, the little honest-eyed boy who had so loved her mother and Judith, who had loved Pauline the maid and suffered with her pain; and then the bigger boy who out of his weakness had begged for a share of her mother’s strength and been refused; and then the man, still honest-eyed, who, aimless, wavering, had cried out to her in misery upon the emptiness of his life; and who later had wept those pure tears of joy that he had found love.  She had a moment of insight, of vision, of terrible understanding.  She did not know what was taking place within her, something racking—­spasmodic throes of sudden growth, the emergence for the first time in all her life of the capacity for pity ...