Daphne entered her room Madeleine received her tenderly; but she could
speak but little, and Daphne felt herself shut out and ignored. What she
said or thought was no longer, it seemed, of any account. She resented
and despised Madeleine's surrender to what she held to be a decaying
superstition; and her haughty manner toward the mild Oratorian whom she
met occasionally on the stairs, or in the corridor, expressed her
disapproval. But it was impossible to argue with a dying woman. She
suffered in silence.

As she sat beside the patient, in the hours of narcotic sleep, when she
relieved one of the nurses, she went often through times of great
bitterness. She could not forgive the attack Captain Boyson had made
upon her; yet she could not forget it. It had so far roused her moral
sense that it led her to a perpetual brooding over the past, a perpetual
re-statement of her own position. She was most troubled, often, by
certain episodes in the past, of which, she supposed Alfred Boyson knew
least; the corrupt use she had made of her money; the false witnesses
she had paid for; the bribes she had given. At the time it had seemed to
her all part of the campaign, in the day's work. She had found herself
in a _milieu_ that demoralized her; her mind had become like "the dyer's
hand, subdued to what it worked in." Now, she found herself thinking in
a sudden terror, "If Alfred Boyson knew so and so!" or, as she looked
down on Madeleine's dying face, "Could I even tell Madeleine that?" And
then would come the dreary thought, "I shall never tell her anything any
more. She is lost to me--even before death."

She tried to avoid thinking of Roger; but the memory of the scene with
Alfred Boyson did, in truth, bring him constantly before her. An inner
debate began, from which she could not escape. She grew white and ill
with it. If she could have rushed away from it, into the full stream of
life, have thrown herself into meetings and discussion, have resumed her
place as the admired and flattered head of a particular society, she
could easily have crushed and silenced the thoughts which tormented her.

But she was held fast. She could not desert Madeleine Verrier in death;
she could not wrench her own hand from this frail hand which clung to
it; even though Madeleine had betrayed the common cause, had yielded at
last to that moral and spiritual cowardice which--as all freethinkers
know--has spoiled and clouded so many death-beds. Daphne-