ed her calm eyes upon Leonora. "I know it," she said. "And
I am dying for love of him."

Leonora uttered an "Ah," that, in spite of herself, was an "Ah" of
horror and of grief.

"That is why," the girl continued, "I am going to Glasgow--to take my
mother away from there." She added, "To the ends of the earth," for, if
the last months had made her nature that of a woman, her phrases were
still romantically those of a schoolgirl. It was as if she had grown
up so quickly that there had not been time to put her hair up. But she
added: "We're no good--my mother and I."

Leonora said, with her fierce calmness:

"No. No. You're not no good. It's I that am no good. You can't let that
man go on to ruin for want of you. You must belong to him."

The girl, she said, smiled at her with a queer, far-away smile--as if
she were a thousand years old, as if Leonora were a tiny child.

"I knew you would come to that," she said, very slowly. "But we are not
worth it--Edward and I."

III

NANCY had, in fact, been thinking ever since Leonora had made that
comment over the giving of the horse to young Selmes. She had been
thinking and thinking, because she had had to sit for many days silent
beside her aunt's bed. (She had always thought of Leonora as her aunt.)
And she had had to sit thinking during many silent meals with Edward.
And then, at times, with his bloodshot eyes and creased, heavy mouth,
he would smile at her. And gradually the knowledge had come to her
that Edward did not love Leonora and that Leonora hated Edward. Several
things contributed to form and to harden this conviction. She was
allowed to read the papers in those days--or, rather, since Leonora was
always on her bed and Edward breakfasted alone and went out early, over
the estate, she was left alone with the papers. One day, in the papers,
she saw the portrait of a woman she knew very well. Beneath it she read
the words: "The Hon. Mrs Brand, plaintiff in the remarkable divorce case
reported on p. 8." Nancy hardly knew what a divorce case was. She had
been so remarkably well brought up, and Roman Catholics do not practise
divorce. I don't know how Leonora had done it exactly. I suppose she had
always impressed it on Nancy's mind that nice women did not read these
things, and that would have been enough to make Nancy skip those pages.

She read, at any rate, the account of the Brand divorce
case--principally because she wanted to tell Leonora about it. She
ima