Lois looked down at her helplessly. In sheer incapacity to affect the
larger issues, she took refuge in the smaller. "Isn't it near your
dinner-time? I'm going your way. We could go along together."

"I don't want any dinner. I'll go home--by and by."

Lois felt herself dismissed. "Very well, Rosie. I'll say good-by for
now. But it will only be for a little while. You understand that, don't
you? I'm not going to let you throw me off. I'm going to cling to you.
I've got the right to do it, because--because the very thing that makes
you unhappy--makes me."

In the eyes that Rosie lifted obliquely Lois read such unutterable
things that she turned away. She carried that look with her as she went
down the hill beneath the oaks and between the sunlit patches of brakes,
spleenwort, and lady-ferns. What scenes, what memories, had called it
up? What part in those scenes and memories had been played by Thor? What
had been the actual experience between this girl and him? Would she ever
know? Had she better know? What should she do if she were to know? Once
more the questions she had been trying to repress urged themselves for
answer; but once more she controlled herself through the counsel of the
inner voice: "Not yet! Not yet!"

CHAPTER XXV

But after Lois had gone Rosie came to life again. That is, she entered
once more the conditions in which her mind was free to tread its round
of grief. Lois kept her out of them. Her father and mother did the same.
Household duties and the tasks of the hothouse and the necessity for
eating and sleeping and speaking did the same. She turned from them all
with a weariness as consuming as a sickness unto death.

She had done so from the instant when, crouching behind the vines of the
cucumber-house, with all her senses strained, she perceived by the mere
rustling of the leaves that Claude was making his way down the long,
green aisle. She knew then that it was the end. If there had been no
other cause of rupture between them, the girl who kept ten or twelve
servants would have created it. Rosie knew enough of Claude to be aware
that love could not bear down the scale against this princeliness of
living. There would be so such repentance and reaction on his part as
she had experienced with Thor. Once he was gone, he was gone. It was the
end.

The soft opening and closing of the hothouse door as he went out reached
her like a sigh, a last sigh, a dying sigh, after which--nothing!