For now she was to taste to the full the bitter difference between the finality of personal decision and a finality imposed, fatefully and irrevocably, from without.

She had thought herself prepared for this ending of hope.

She had even, imagining herself hardened and indifferent, gone in advance of it and had sought to put the past under her feet and to build up a new life.

But she had not been prepared; that she now knew.

The imagination of the fact was not its realisation in her very blood and bones, nor the standing ready, armed for the blow, this feel of the blade between her ribs.