"Because--because I--I couldn't bear it."

"You can bear it if I can, can't you--if I've had to bear it all these
weeks and months."

"Yes, but that's--" she covered her face with her hands--"that's what
makes it so terrible."

"Of course it makes it terrible; but it isn't as terrible now as it
was--to you anyhow."

"But why do you withdraw when--when you love him--and he loves
you----?"

"I do it because I want to throw all the cards on the table. It's what
my common sense has been telling me to do all along, only I've never
worked round to it till we had our talk this afternoon. Now I
see----"

"What do you see, Miss Walbrook?"

"I see that we've got to give him a clean sheet, or he'll never know
where he is. He can't decide between us because he's in an impossible
position. We'll have to set him absolutely free, so that he may begin
again. I'll do it on my side. You can do--what you like."

She went as abruptly as she came, leaving Letty clearer than ever as
to her new course.

By midnight she was ready. In the back spare room she waited only to
be sure that all in the house were asleep.

She had heard Allerton come in about half past nine, and the
whispering of voices told that Steptoe was making his explanations,
that she was out of sorts, had dined in her room, and begged not to be
disturbed. At about half past ten she heard the prince go upstairs to
his own room, though she fancied that outside her door he had paused
for a second to listen. That was the culminating minute of her
self-repression. Once it was over, and he had gone on his way, she
knew the rest would be easier.

By midnight she had only to wait quietly. In the old gray rag and the
battered black hat she surveyed herself without emotion. Since making
her last attempt to escape her relation to all these things had
changed. They had become less significant, less important. The
emblems of the higher life which in the previous autumn she had buried
with ritual and regret she now packed away in the closet, with hardly
a second thought. The old gray rag which had then seemed the livery of
a degraded life was now no more than the resumption of her reality.

"I'll go as I came," she had been saying to herself, all the evening.
"I know he'd like me to take the things he's given me; but I'd rather
be just what I was."

If there was any ritual in what she had done since Miss Walbrook had
left her it was in the putting away of small things by w