So she turned from him, and denied him every chance of speaking. And the next week Bob left England as he had come.

VII

She visited no more palmists. She did nothing and went nowhere, neither worked nor read. The long-preserved shell of habit had crumbled at last. But although acquiescence might mean open ruin, she could only wait passively. She could not move without some vital prompting.

It was not till the middle of June that the first hint of direction came to her, the first faint summons bidding her live anew. And as once before, in the life that was now dead and discarded, it came in the shape of a letter from Aunt Perdy.

“I am passing,” she wrote, “through a time of hideous, lonely suffering. The powers of darkness in the heavens above are doing all they can to kill my heart and brain. It is dreadful to be like me – open to invisible influences; for by the same means I am both aided and hindered. Pray for Auntie, whose heart is almost breaking, and who is presently without love or hope of any kind, and feels miserably conquered. Come and see her if you possibly can.”

To this Joanna sent no answer, but she moved out of her lethargy and made simple preparations for a journey to Italy. To raise the money she found she must sell some of her treasures, but she did so without a pang. Not that there was any excitement or expectancy in her as there had been when she responded to her aunt’s first summons. Now she was simply obedient to the seeming accident through which her new, untried life could stir. Her will no longer rose hard and possessive, driving her hither and thither. Her will now was merely the helm by which her frail bark might once more be steered to float upon a stream of life. But what other power had urged her to respond, whither the stream might bear her, she did not ask.

Not that even now she was quite beyond the reach of a deathly backwash. In the late afternoon of the day before her departure, when nothing remained to do, she found herself overwhelmed once more by the old sadness.