The quiet Campagna with its distant faintly outlined Sabine hills was rotten to the core.
The duke passed across a glade at a little distance, and, looking up, smiled gravely at her, with a slight courteous gesture of his brown hand.
She smiled mechanically in response and shrank back into her room.

Her husband had suddenly become a thing to shudder at, repulsive as a reptile, intolerable.

Her life with him, without Michael, stretched before her like a loathsome disease, a leprosy, which in the interminable years would gradually eat her away, a death by inches.
The first throes of a frustrated passion at the stake have probably seldom failed to engender a fierce rebellion against the laws which light the faggots round it.
The fire had licked Fay.

She fled blindfold from it, not knowing whither, only away from that pain, over any precipice, into any slough.
"I cannot live without him," she sobbed to herself.

"This is not just a common love affair like other people's.