She passed the schoolhouse with its beckoning ash-tree. The schoolhouse stirred the pain under her heart. She remembered the shining night when she had shown herself there and triumphed.
The pain then was so intolerable that her mind revolted from it as from a thing that simply could not be. The idea by which she lived asserted itself against the menace of destruction. It was not so much an idea as an instinct, blind, obstinate, immovable. It had behind it the wisdom and the persistence of life. It refused to believe where belief meant death to it.
She said to herself, "He's lying. He's lying. He's made it all up. He never met them."
* * * * *
She had passed the turn of the hill. She had come to the high towers, sinister and indistinct, to the hollow walls and haunted arcades of the dead mining station. Upthorne was hidden by the shoulder of the hill.
She stopped suddenly, there where the road skirted the arcades. She was struck by a shock of premonition, an instinct older and profounder than that wisdom of the blood. She had the sense that what was happening now, her coming, like this, to the towers and the arcades, had happened before, and was so related to what was about to happen that she knew this also and with the same shock of recognition.
It would happen when she had come to the last arch of the colonnade.
It was happening now. She had come to the last arch.
* * * * *
That instant she was aware of Rowcliffe and Gwenda coming toward her down the hill.