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her clothes andstepped into the bath. The fever subsided. She lay in the bath for an hour with her eyes closed and her mind empty, though not properly empty, for beneath the surface moved the knowledge of what she had just done. It was not to be looked at, it was not to be acknowledged at all; but there are forms of mental experience that exist outside the machinery of repression, and in those obscure regions of her psyche arose the question whether, having done this once, she would do it again, and though she did not actually think this thought, and would have denied it vehemently had it flickered into consciousness, she was aware, as one is aware of all such things that don’t bear thinking about, that the answer was yes.
    Some hours later she was sitting on the back lawn, with a drink, in a white wicker chair, in the shade of the ash tree, her novel in her lap, when she heard Max at the front door. She came into the house, went down the hall and let him in; he seemed to be having trouble with his keys. He was in his dark suit, his tie was loosened, he was hot and tired, and more than anything he wanted a drink.
    “Bloody day,” he said.
    Behind him on the far side of the drive the pines rose in a dark mass against the evening sky. She embraced him with a warmth unusual for her, and as she did so an ironic thought sprang into her mind, that it’s the guilt of the adulterous woman that drives her into her husband’s arms.
    “Hello,” he said as she clung to him like a woman adrift, a woman drowning, “what’s all this?”
    She moved away to the mirror over the empty fireplace and patted at her hair, and tried to find some sign of sin on her face.
    “Nothing. I missed you today, that’s all.”
    “Why did you miss me?”
    She turned to face him. There was real curiosity in his voice, and she felt the psychiatrist in the man, or rather, the man receded and the psychiatrist emerged as the wheels turned and she saw him examine this fragment of her psychic life and fisharound for its meaning. In that moment he became her enemy. She knew then that any openness between them was dangerous, and that her explosive secret must be hidden with especial skill from the eyes of this sudden stranger with his desperately acute powers of mental intrusion and perception.
    She poured them each a drink and thought, How easily he will find out, unless I am on perpetual alert. Not through any carelessness of the obvious kind but through reading my mind —reading me like a book, finding it written in fragments of behavior, fleeting nuances of expression, certain absences of response of which I would not be aware. Oh, I must be vigilant, from this point on I must be vigilant. This was her thought. But she didn’t have to put this policy of dissimulation into immediate effect, for Charlie came running in and began breathlessly telling his father about a bone he’d found in the marsh.
    “I think it’s human,” he said.
    “I rather doubt that,” said Max, smiling slightly.
    “I think,” said Charlie darkly, “there may have been a murder.”
    Stella drifted over to the French windows and gazed out at the setting sun and allowed herself to think about her lover.
    She thought about him intermittently for the next three days without once going down to the vegetable garden. Max startled her at dinner one night by mentioning him by name.
    Did she disguise the shock it gave her, to hear his name on Max’s lips?
    She thinks so, though perhaps Max wasn’t paying attention, often his mind was elsewhere. He said that Edgar Stark was needed for a few days in the chaplain’s garden. Thank God, she thought; now I don’t have to imagine him out there all the time.
    A horribly anxious few days, then she started to feel calmer. She thought it was the relief that came of running a risk and getting away with it. She was surprised to discover a fresh affection for Max, and realized she was grateful to him for suspecting nothing, for unwittingly