She could bear it.

But would she?

It was not true that nothing was altered. Louis had been lowered in her eyes. She had seen him joined to his idols.

And where did the blame lie? In his weakness, or in her own dreadful endurance and humility?

This was what must be put to the test for his sake as well as for hers. Her lust for sacrifice should be gratified no longer. Would he also put his infirmity behind him? She had made her choice. He must make his. If the mire was his place, let him sink into it. It was cleaner than the stifling falseness into which she had dragged him.

Having walked about for nearly two hours, now in a sick fury, now in concentrated thought, she slowly returned to Chapel Court.

Her face under the rakish little hat looked pinched as if by illness. But as she was wearily opening the Moons’ green door, she stopped, and a more hopeful expression came over her features.

Some one had begun to thump out the tune called Simple Aveu upon a neighbouring piano.

Vulgar and sugary air! How often in her early teens had Georgie wakened the household of a morning by practising it thinly upon her fiddle! The atmosphere now it conjured up was one of so utter, so unsuspectedly morbid dreariness, that Joanna was forced to take comfort thereat. Whatever life might be now, it was a thousand times better than it had been then. Not before had she realized to the full the unhappiness of her teens. If she were at that moment, half so unhappy, she would certainly kill herself. But she had something better to do.

In the house a telegram awaited her. It was from Linnet.

V

It was a telegram of eleven words.

Joanna read it once. After a short, passive interval she read it a second time. After a longer, more active interval she read it a third time. But already at the third time she knew it by heart.

When she drew the thin, folded slip out of its envelope that she might read it a fourth time, she was seated in the night express on her way to Scotland. She still knew it by heart. For the past five hours it had been reiterating itself in her brain, even on her lips. What was more, the wheels under her carriage and the pulsing engine in front, had both got it by heart. They kept repeating the eleven words over and over in a kind of drone. But though this was so, though it had caused her to do so many things with collected swiftness; though it had brought her to the station, and had put her into this train that swung and thudded northwards, perhaps it was all a mistake, a figment of her own tired brain?

So she read it for the fourth time:

“Mother not well don’t worry but think you should come Linnet.”