"'I've got Sumner.'
"At any time before that meeting I should have exulted over the death of Sumner's child, but in the presence of Hetty's misery that old hatred would not come back for its gratification. I was looking at her face which was so familiar and so changed, and it was as if I woke up again to love for her after two years and a half of insensibility. What a beaten and unhappy thing she was—she whom I had loved and hated so bitterly.
"'It seems a long way back now to Kent, Harry—and mother's farm,' she said.
"'You've parted with it?'
"'Farm and furniture—and mostly it's gone. Sumner bets. He's betted most of it away. It's hard, you see, to find a job but easy to fancy a winner. Which doesn't win....'
"'My father used to do that,' I said. 'I'd like to shoot every race-horse in England.'
"'I hated selling the farm,' she said. 'I sold the farm and came into this dingy old London. Sumner dragged me here and he's dragging me down. It's not his fault; it's how he's made. But when a spring day comes like this——! I think of Kent and the winds on the Downs and the blackthorn in the hedges and the little yellow noses of the primroses and the first elder leaves coming out, until I want to cry and scream. But there's no getting out of it. Here I am. I've come to look at these flowers here. What's the good? They just hurt me.'
"She stared at the flowers.
"'My God!' I said, 'but this hurts me too. I didn't expect——'
"'What did you expect?' she asked, and turned that still face of hers to me and silenced me.