And now I am wondering what is going to happen, what everyone will say and do, particularly Cheneston and mother.

I wish I could find a corner of the earth now to crouch in, and I want it to be dark and utterly silent, so that I may think and find out where I stand.

VII

Sometimes I wonder what humans are fitted with imaginations for; they are a great nuisance and utterly unreliable. I was fitted with a high-power imagination—it overbalances me sometimes, swings me down to misery and nearer to the face of ecstasy than I was ever meant to go. I spent a sleepless night wondering what would happen after my confession that I had heard from the renegade Captain Markham, and my inexplicable tears; by the time I rose I had all the results planned out, beginning with the interview with Cheneston, in which I implied my love for Walter Markham, and ending in a sort of grand finale scene with mother, in which elegance and reproaches and jasmine scent mingled, and my clothes, all I had cost, and my obvious lack of chic and charm were hurled at my head.

None of these things happened.

Grace Gilpin and her mother drove by in the high dog-cart as I was taking Pomp and Circumstance for their morning run; they stopped and chatted, but neither of them referred to Walter Markham, or Cheneston, or the little scene I had enacted in their drawing-room the previous night.

I am one of the people who never "click" in their effects.

I had meant to be so frightfully subtle over Walter Markham when the idea first flashed into my mind. I meant to leave my little audience with the vague impression that there might be something in it, that I might have found in Walter Markham's society I had made a mistake in getting engaged so quickly to Cheneston Cromer—I just wanted to make it easy for Cheneston to break off the engagement.

I was so sure he would come to me and ask me if his first suspicions were correct and Walter and I cared for each other; then I would be delicate and subtle again, and hint at devotion, nothing settled, nothing sure.

I had wanted the delicacy of a butterfly, and I had trodden as earnestly and thoroughly as an elephant—a whole herd of them.