XIII
Decision
On making up her mind that she must break off her engagement, Alex, unaware, took the bravest decision of her life.
She was being true to an instinctive standard, in which she herself only believed with part of her mind, and which was absolutely unknown to any of those who made up her surroundings.
She hardly knew, however, that she had taken any resolution in her many wakeful nights and discontented days, until the moment when she actually put it into execution. She wrote no eloquent letter, entered into no elaborate explanation such as would have seemed to her, after the manner of her generation, theoretically indispensable to the situation.
She blurted out three bald words which struck upon her own hearing with a sense of extreme shock the moment they were uttered.
"It's no use."
Noel looked hard at her for a moment, and then did not pretend to misunderstand her meaning.
"What, us being engaged?"
His intuitive comprehension, of which Alex had received so little proof ever before, might be unflattering, but it struck her with immense relief.