She saw that he was scarcely realising her at all. She choked down all questions that concerned themselves. She simply agreed, nodding her head.
He did look at her then, smiling as he used to do.
"It's awfully hard on us. It won't be for more than a day or two. But I must put things right at home or it will be all up. I don't care for the others, of course, but if anything happened to father through me ..." He told her to write to the Charing Cross post-office. He would do the same. In a day or two it would be all right. He pressed her hand and was gone.
When she looked about her the street seemed quite empty although it was full of people. She threw up her head. She wouldn't be beaten by anybody ... only, it was lonely going back to the house and all of them ... alone ... without Martin.
She cried a little on her way home. But they were the last tears she shed.
CHAPTER IX
THE INSIDE SAINTS
Maggie, when she was nearly home, halted suddenly. She stopped as when on the threshold of a room that should be empty one sees waiting a stranger. If at the end of all this she should lose Martin! ...
There was the stranger who had come to her now and would not again depart. She recognised the sharp pain, the almost unconscious pulling back on the sudden edge of a dim pit, as something that would always be with her now—always. One knows that in the second stage of a great intimacy one's essential loneliness is only redoubled by close companionship. One asks for so much more, and then more and more, but that final embrace is elusive and no physical contact can surrender it. But she was young and did not know that yet. All she knew was that she would have to face these immediate troubles alone, that she would not see him for perhaps a week, that she would not know what his people at home were doing, and that she must not let any of these thoughts come up into her brain. She must keep them all back: if she did not, she would tumble into some foolish precipitate action.