She remembered very well the night he had pleaded with her, and she remembered, too, with a gripping at her heart, her own contemptuous answer, and her departure the next morning for her father's roof.

And then the lie she had told!--that Felix had bluntly announced to her his plan for raising sheep in Australia, ordering her to get ready to go with him at once.
She recalled, too, this time with burning cheeks, a certain unsigned letter, in an unknown hand, which had reached her after her flight with Dalton, describing her husband as stunned and dazed by the blow, the writer denouncing her for her desertion, and warning her of the retribution in store for her if she remained with a man like the one on whom she had staked her future happiness.

She had laughed at its contents and tossed it across the table to Dalton, who had read it with a smile, caught it between a pair of tongs and, lighting a match, held it over the flame until it was consumed.
Then--as, tortured by these recollections, she lay staring at the dark--Martha's prediction, based on Stephen's, belief, that Felix would kill Dalton at sight, rose up in her mind, and with it came another great fear--one that, for a moment, stopped her heart from beating and left her numb.

In the quick succession of blows that Martha had dealt, she had not fully grasped this part of the story.

Now she did.