"Yes," she said slowly, "you are quite right, I have come down in the world, and I am a housemaid--at that house I have just come from."
He burst out laughing. It seemed to be the funniest news he had heard for a long time.
"Indeed! Perhaps you will invite me to call and have some supper with you and the cook some evening?"
"We are not allowed to have callers. I don't get on with the cook. I am under notice to quit." She made her statements quite gravely.
"But this is great!" He began to laugh again uproariously. "So you have got the sack! And now you will have to go back to the career of famous journalist. But why have left it, my dear girl? Is it a joke, or some new craze for getting copy?"
Steadily, calmly, with pale lips and toneless voice, she lied on--for Bran's sake, for Garrett's sake, for the sake of all she held dear. What better reason can a woman have for lying her soul away!
"No, no joke, no craze: stern necessity. I can't write any more, that is all. I had brain fever, and when it was all over I found that I could n't put another sentence together. I am done for as a writer. So I just dropped out of the old life and disappeared. The only thing I can do now is work with my hands."
"But"--he stammered. "But it will come back--all you want is time, rest--"
"Never," she said firmly. "Never. It is finished. My brain is gone. I am Alice Brook now--Alice Brook, housemaid. I shall never be anything else."
"Good God!" He gazed at her aghast. There was no glimmering of doubt in his mind as to the truth of her story. It seemed almost too extraordinary to be true, but he had never known Val to lie. He was aware, in fact, from painful experience that she despised liars, and held a creed that nothing worth a lie was to be found in the world. It was not for him to know that she had at last found something she considered worth lying for. Besides, she so thoroughly looked the part. Thin, hollow-eyed, and badly dressed, with the hopeless lines unhappiness had sketched about her lips, she was the picture of an overworked slave who worked too much by day, and got too little rest at night.