To-night she had gone back to it again as to a tottering wall.
She had worn a little pathway over heaps of miserable conjectures and twisted memories towards that particular place.
She saw again the duke's dying face, and the tender fixity of his eyes.
She could almost hear his difficult waning voice saying: "The sun shines.

He does not see them, the spring and the sunshine.
Since a year he does not see them.

Francesca, how much longer will you keep your Cousin Michael in prison ?" _Since a year he does not see them._ It was two years now.
The shock to Fay at the moment those words were spoken had been that her husband had known all the time.

That revelation blotted out all other thoughts for the time being.

It even blotted out all considerations of her own conduct towards Michael, which it might conceivably have rendered acute.