where they had stood, in what position, and every slight change and shift of that position, that he recalled the pressure of her hands on his arms, not pushing him away, but clinging! The memory of them kept recurring to him over and over again, and each time with sharper, keener sweetness. For clinging hands tell more than defenceless lips.
Sheilah didn't know that she had told Roger anything. She didn't know that she had anything to tell him. She was as unaware, at first, of the serious thing that had happened to her as she had been of her clinging hands.
After he left her in the dark hall on the threshold of the front room, she went in and ctosed the door softly on his receding footsteps, mechanically turning on the light and going to her room to take off her things, too stunned to think or feel anything; performing the mechanical acts of undressing and getting into bed in a state of sort of mental and emotional numbness. It wasn't until she woke near morning sometime, that she began to feel and to suffer. Remorse and self-disillusionment crowded out all the joy that might have been hers—that would have been hers, had she been free, either from Felix, or from her merciless conscience.
Of what sort of clay was she made? She was a
