Here was healing at last. Betty was dead!
CHAPTER XXXII
DARKNESS
But when the morning came I could not be sure that Betty was dead.
They brought me a telegram.
In wrenching the envelope off I tore the message twice. My fingers could hardly piece the signature together. I realised, at last, the Duncombe housemaid's name. My mother was sinking, she said; and we were expected back by the night train.
The message had been sent an hour after we left home. It reached Lowndes Square seven hours before I had come beating at the door. That it had lain in the hall forgotten seemed to me hardly to matter now. Not even to-day could I go home.
I seemed to see the future. If my mother had not died in the night, the end would very quickly come. There was mercy there.
As for me—I knew I should not die till I was sure that Betty was out of the world. As though to our best, our only friend, I turned to the thought of her physical weakness.
But I must be sure. I rose up out of my bed ... and Darkness took me in her arms.