II
She was saved, he had gone, flinging on his coat and snatching his carpet-bag, but for long she remained trembling and fearing his return. She shuddered at intervals as she remembered their struggle, conducted in that horrible silence; their antagonism had been so condensed; none of it could slip away in words. She could still feel where his fingers had gripped into her flesh. If Calthorpe had not come! Now, now, they were on the road to Spalding; she was alone in the house, she was to breakfast with Silas and Linnet. Her shudders of horror gave place to the sweet shivering she knew when she thought of Linnet, an etherealised desire, a trembling of her spirit more than of her body, a going out towards a young and fit companion, who by a refinement of perfection was also a lover. Gradually she ceased to think of Gregory, and lost herself in the other thought, lying propped up on her pillow with an unconscious smile of heavenly happiness in her eyes and upon her lips. She rose presently, and in the same dream started to dress, delighting in the touch of the cold water she splashed over her throat and arms. The puritanical neatness of each garment, and the fibre of her laundered linen, likewise satisfied her as she became clothed. She had noticed how, without any exaggeration of fancy, small physical experiences were intensified of late,—colours were brighter, the song of birds more ringing, her flesh more sensitive to the touch, and in looking at people she had observed how the pores of their skin were distinct, or the firm planting of eyelashes, and sweep of eyebrow,—all these things, that were foolishly unimportant, but that added a vividness to daily life. She was in every detail more keenly alive; her nostrils dilated to smell the air, and she touched the sill of the window, where the wood was faintly warm under the sun, with a sense of comradeship. She moved, too, with a difference; her tread became resilient; her foot was springy as it poised upon the ground. Her small head carried itself with a light elasticity in the air, and she was actually conscious of the soft mass of her hair that caressed the nape of her neck as she turned her head. She had a wish for woods and cornlands; to sit in the roots of a tree beside a brook, allowing the water to eddy between her staying fingers; to bathe her body in a lake or in the surf of the sea. So, in loving one man, one loved the whole company of earth? Love was illimitable indeed, if it conferred that privilege, a wider thing than mere absorption in a fellow-being that was a creature, after all, of limitations as narrow as any other.