She stared at him.
"Home!" she echoed. "I am not going home. I want to work--and I should like to die out here. What is there for me to do at home?"
Doctor Forsyth hesitated a moment. He was ciphering out conclusions. The reason he had to give her was one which must, despite its joy, give pain. Better therefore to speak out while her mind was still too confused to grasp the immensity of either.
"My dear lady," he said, and his voice was gentleness itself, "I must deny all your statements. You are going home. You do not want to die out here, and you will have plenty to do at home looking after"--he paused--"the colonel's child."
He turned and left her voiceless, but athrill to her finger-tips, wondering why she had not guessed it before.
Then with a rush came remembrance. "People who play Providence----"
She gave a moan and turned her face to the wall.
[XI]
When Marrion arrived in England just before Christmas she found a white world of snow. But it seemed to her not so white, so pure, so chill as that soft pall which had lain on Marmaduke Muir's grave on the Balkan heights, when, stopping at Varna on her way home on purpose to visit it, she had found it unrecognisable under the heavy snow. For the winter of '54-'55 was the severest on record, even in those southern mountains.
There had seemed no room there for her tears, her remorse, her pitiful plaint to be forgiven for trying to play Providence. So she had come away more stunned than ever.