"Oh--nothing! I wondered if you'd finished with that book." Such as this might be her excuse.
"Yes, I have. I left it downstairs in the dining-room."
"Well--good-night, Mary."
"Good-night, Fanny."
No more than this. That locked door seemed symbolical of Mary in those days. So had she barred all entrance to her soul from them and like the Holy of Holies behind the locked gates of the Temple was inapproachable to their unsanctified feet.
And all this seeming was no less than the actual truth. To Mary her body had indeed become the sanctuary, the very chalice of the Host of sacred things. She knew she was going to have a child. Such knowledge was pure folly and had no foundation upon fact. It lay only in her imagination.
Yet lying awake at night and waking early in the mornings with the first light the sun cast into her room, she had sensations, inventions only of the fancy, that were unmistakable to her.
Already she was conscious of the dual life of her being. Such had happened to her as indeed had separated her in difference from them all in that house.
Her thoughts of Liddiard were glowing thoughts. Sometimes as she lay, half sleeping in her bed, she felt him there beside her. But in all her fully conscious moments, she had no need of his return.
Their meetings upon the cliffs those two nights before he had gone from Bridnorth, had left her calm rather than excited. Almost she would have resented his actual presence in her life just then. In the distance which separated them, she felt the warm sense of that part of her being he had become; but his absence was not fretting her with the need of his embraces. No furnace of sexual inclination had there been set alight in her. In this respect he had not differenced her. She was the same Mary Throgmorton of outwardly passionless stone, only the hidden flame he had set light within her was that, unquenchable, which the stress of circumstance in time would burn with such a fervid purpose as none of them could stay.