“Am I sincere? Is my place really back at Porthlew, with Cousin Bertie? Is it perhaps an easy evasion to say that I am of no use to her? She gave us a home when mother died, and she has lost Hazel. Frances left her—there is only me now. Self-sacrifice—is that the key? But it all seems useless—pointless.”
She remained, seeking the solution.
Even when the hand of circumstance flung her against it, it still failed to awaken her inner certainties.
Frederick Tregaskis died of pneumonia within a fortnight.
Rosamund made her preparations for a hurried departure, and found time to return once more to the cottage on the hill.
“Is it good-bye again?” she asked dumbly of her surroundings. “Certainly there is no doubt now that I have to go to Porthlew again. The solution has come, I suppose.”
She felt oddly disconcerted and at variance with herself.
At all events, there was more sense of blankness than of acute bitterness in her farewell to the cottage. The renunciation, if renunciation there was, remained strangely devoid of pain.
She reflected dimly that all that for which the cottage in the Wye Valley stood was hers still, and would remain hers, and in the days at Porthlew which followed, when Bertha frankly outfaced bitterness and loss with a courage that did not shrink from reference to their divided sorrows, Rosamund told herself passionately that to her, and her alone, belonged the deepest memory of Frances.
Since her solution was to come from within, and not from without, it was almost with the sense of puzzled acceptance that is brought to an anticipated situation, that she heard Bertha’s decision to leave Porthlew.