ave her the idea that she ought to go to comfort her mother--the
mother that bore her, though she hardly knew what the words meant. At
the same time she knew that her mother had left her father with another
man--therefore she pitied her father, and thought it terrible in herself
that she trembled at the sound of her father's voice. If her mother
was that sort of woman it was natural that her father should have had
accesses of madness in which he had struck herself to the ground. And
the voice of her conscience said to her that her first duty was to her
parents. It was in accord with this awakened sense of duty that she
undressed with great care and meticulously folded the clothes that she
took off. Sometimes, but not very often, she threw them helter-skelter
about the room.

And that sense of duty was her prevailing mood when Leonora, tall,
clean-run, golden-haired, all in black, appeared in her doorway, and
told her that Edward was dying of love for her. She knew then with her
conscious mind what she had known within herself for months--that Edward
was dying--actually and physically dying--of love for her. It seemed
to her that for one short moment her spirit could say: "Domine, nunc
dimittis,... Lord, now, lettest thou thy servant depart in peace." She
imagined that she could cheerfully go away to Glasgow and rescue her
fallen mother.

IV

AND it seemed to her to be in tune with the mood, with the hour, and
with the woman in front of her to say that she knew Edward was dying of
love for her and that she was dying of love for Edward. For that fact
had suddenly slipped into place and become real for her as the niched
marker on a whist tablet slips round with the pressure of your thumb.
That rubber at least was made.

And suddenly Leonora seemed to have become different and she seemed to
have become different in her attitude towards Leonora. It was as if
she, in her frail, white, silken kimono, sat beside her fire, but upon a
throne. It was as if Leonora, in her close dress of black lace, with the
gleaming white shoulders and the coiled yellow hair that the girl had
always considered the most beautiful thing in the world--it was as
if Leonora had become pinched, shrivelled, blue with cold, shivering,
suppliant. Yet Leonora was commanding her. It was no good commanding
her. She was going on the morrow to her mother who was in Glasgow.

Leonora went on saying that she must stay there to save Edward, who was
dying of