Mother Sideacher."

The girl came swinging along, a silhouette beneath a gas-lamp; Edward,
another, slouched at her side. They were talking just as they had talked
any time since the girl had been seventeen; with the same tones, the
same joke about an old beggar woman who always amused them at Branshaw.
The girl, a little later, opened Leonora's door whilst she was still
kissing Edward on the forehead as she had done every night.

"We've had a most glorious time," she said. "He's ever so much better.
He raced me for twenty yards home. Why are you all in the dark?"

Leonora could hear Edward going about in his room, but, owing to the
girl's chatter, she could not tell whether he went out again or not.
And then, very much later, because she thought that if he were drinking
again something must be done to stop it, she opened for the first time,
and very softly, the never-opened door between their rooms. She wanted
to see if he had gone out again. Edward was kneeling beside his bed with
his head hidden in the counterpane. His arms, outstretched, held out
before him a little image of the Blessed Virgin--a tawdry, scarlet and
Prussian blue affair that the girl had given him on her first return
from the convent. His shoulders heaved convulsively three times, and
heavy sobs came from him before she could close the door. He was not a
Catholic; but that was the way it took him.

Leonora slept for the first time that night with a sleep from which she
never once started.

III

AND then Leonora completely broke down--on the day that they returned
to Branshaw Teleragh. It is the infliction of our miserable minds--it is
the scourge of atrocious but probably just destiny that no grief comes
by itself. No, any great grief, though the grief itself may have gone,
leaves in its place a train of horrors, of misery, and despair. For
Leonora was, in herself, relieved. She felt that she could trust Edward
with the girl and she knew that Nancy could be absolutely trusted. And
then, with the slackening of her vigilance, came the slackening of
her entire mind. This is perhaps the most miserable part of the entire
story. For it is miserable to see a clean intelligence waver; and
Leonora wavered.

You are to understand that Leonora loved Edward with a passion that was
yet like an agony of hatred. And she had lived with him for years and
years without addressing to him one word of tenderness. I don't know how
she could do it. At the beginni