"I don't know what you're talking about, I don't believe you do either. You say the strangest things."
"You don't find them strange, you understand them better than I do. I am many years older than you--ye Goths, how many! I am tolerably blasé, as befits my age. But you, you are tired--mortally tired--of everything already. I've not yet reached that stage. You don't know what keenness means; thank goodness there are still a good many things which I am keen about. Just as something turns up for which you're on the point of really caring, a shadow steps from the back of your mind to the front, and stops you. I don't know what it is, but I know it's there."
"I'm going back."
As this man spoke something tugged at her heartstrings which filled her with a sort of terror. If he was beginning to regard her attitude towards life--of which she herself was only too hideously conscious--as a problem, the solution of which he had set himself to find out, what might the consequences not be? Then she could not stop to think. She swung the car round towards home. As if in obedience to her unspoken hint he changed the subject, speaking with that calm assumption of authority which galled her the more because she found herself so frequently compelled to submission.
"You must teach me to drive this machine of yours."
"My mechanician will be able to do that better than I can, I am myself only a tyro."
"Thank you, I prefer that you should teach me. Which handle do you move to stop?" She showed him. "And which to start?" She showed him again.
Before they parted, she had put him, however unwillingly, through quite a small course of elementary instruction. In consequence of which she had a bad quarter of an hour, when, later, she was in her own sitting-room, alone.
"He frightens me! He makes me do things I don't want to do; and then--he seems to know me better than I know myself. Is it so obvious that I find it difficult to take a real interest in things? or has he a preternaturally keen sense of perception? Either way it isn't nice for me. It's true enough; nothing does interest me. How should it? What does money, and all that matter; when there's that--shadow--in the prison, coming closer to me, day by day? I believe that being where I am--Miss Arnott of Exham Park--makes it worse, because if it weren't for the shadow, it would be so different--so different!"
That night she dreamed of Hugh Morice. She and he were on the motor car together, flying through the sunshine, on and on and on, happy as the day was bright, and the road was fair. Suddenly the sun became obscured, all the world was dark; they were approaching a chasm. Although it was so dark she knew that it was there. In a wild frenzy of fear she tried to stop the car, to find, all at once, that it had no brake. She made to leap out on to the road, but Mr Morice seized her round the waist and held her. In another moment they were dashing over the edge of an abyss, into the nameless horrors which lay below.