A sudden resigned sadness descended on Joanna, blotting out emotion for the time with its lassitude. It was all too difficult for her to understand. She felt a faint nausea, and only longed to be alone. There was no inclination either to plead or to weep. In a sort of dream she listened to her own voice calmly releasing Bob. What was it to him that she saw the remainder of life stretching before her like a dull dusty road? There was not one kind thought in her for him. He had failed her and made her fail. Still in a dream she watched herself take him to the door and shake his hand mechanically.

But Bob lingered on the steps. And as he looked at her standing there six inches above him on the door-mat, staring past him at the rain, the truth broke from him. It hurt him, and he hoped it would hurt her.

“If only you had cared one bit for me, Joanna!”

“I for you?” Joanna looked at him now.

“Yes, that has been it. You’ve never cared a straw – only for yourself, and for something … Ideas, perhaps, I don’t know what … never for me.”

At this something seemed to snap in Joanna’s brain, and the grey street danced scarlet before her eyes. She raised her right hand, swung it far back, and putting strength into the open palm, struck the side of Bob’s fascinated face.

His bowler hat bounded down the steps with an absurd hollow sound at each contact, and rolled across the wet pavement to rest on the grating of an overworked drain. And after one petrified moment he followed it, his hand to his stung cheek. But before he had picked it up Joanna was gone into the house and the door was shut.

VIII

She ran back to the parlour. For a minute she remained furious, glowing from her undreamed-of action, but this faded quickly and left her ill with chagrin. Who could have foreseen such an ending to heroic love? What had happened? She must think! No. She must not think! Not yet. Not for some time.

The noise of some one stirring in the room overhead interrupted her at her task of blindfolding thought. There was a sound as if a book had been dropped, and the crystals on the chandeliers tinkled from the vibration. Mabel! Yes it must be Mabel in the drawing-room. Mabel, sitting smiling to herself! Perhaps she had been at the window – had seen what had happened. Joanna felt her vanity flayed.

It was a relief however having to call upon her energies, so as to escape the slanting, malicious sympathy of her cousin’s eyes; and stealing from the parlour she went on tiptoe to the hatstand where she had thrown her wet coat on coming in. As if in league with her action, there was a sudden, resolute reinforcement in the sound of the rain outside; and some unconscious instinct of care made the girl take off the trimmed hat she was wearing, and pull on instead the old tammy in which she had met Bob the first time.