Now that tears could come to her she was released and free, the strange madness of that night and day was over and she could tell him everything. Her pride came back to her as she told him, but when he started up and wanted to go at once and find Baxter and drag him through the streets of London by the scruff of his neck and then hang him from the top of the Tower she said: "No, Henry dear, it's no use being angry. Anger isn't in this. I understand how it was. He's weak, Bunny is, and he'll always be weak, and he'll always be a trouble to any woman who loves him, but in his own way he did love me. But I'm not clear yet. It's been my fault terribly as well as his. I shouldn't have listened to Ellen, or if I did, should have gone further. I would take him back, but I haven't any right to him. If he'd told me everything from the beginning I could have gone and seen his mother, I could have found out how it really was. Now I shall never know. But what I _do_ know is that somehow he thought he'd slip through, and that if there _was_ a way, he'd leave that girl to her unhappiness. If he could have found a way he wouldn't have cared how unhappy she was. He would be glad for her to die. I can't love him any more after that. I can't love him, but I shall miss all that that love was . . . the little things. . . ."
By the evening of that day she was perfectly calm. For three days he scarcely left her side--and he was walking with a stranger. She had grown in the space of that night so much older that she was now ahead of him. She had been a child; she was now a woman.
She told him that Baxter had written to her and that she had answered him. She went back to Victoria. She was calm, quiet--and, as he knew, most desperately unhappy.
"Oh yes, she will," said Mary. "How sentimental you are, Henry!"
"I'm not sentimental," said Henry indignantly. "But I know my sister better than you know her."
"You may know your sister," Mary retorted, "but you don't know anything about women. They must have something to look after. If you take one thing away, they'll find something else. It's their only religion, and it's the religion they want, not the prophets."
She added: "Millie is far more interested in life than I am. She is enchanted by it. Nothing and nobody will stop her excitement about it. Nobody will ever keep her back from it. She'll go on to her death standing up in the middle of it, tossing it around----