“I do realise it,” Katherine answered firmly. “It needn’t hurt her really, if her love for me is stronger than her hatred of Philip. I’ve thought it all out. If she loves me she’ll see that my love for her isn’t changed at all,—that it’s there just as it always was; that it’s only that she has made me choose, either Phil’s happiness or unhappiness. I can only choose one way. He’s ready to give up everything, surrender all the splendid things he was going to do, give up half of me, perhaps more, to the family—perhaps more. He hates the life here, but he’ll live it, under Mother and grandfather and the rest, for my sake. It isn’t fair that he should. Mother, if she loves me, will see that. But I don’t believe,” here Katherine’s voice trembled again, “that she cares for anything so much as beating Philip. He’s the first person in the world who ever opposed her.... She knows that I’ll love her always, always, but Phil’s life shan’t be spoilt. Nothing matters beside that.”
She stopped, her breast heaving, her eyes flashing; he looked at her and was amazed, as in his queer, isolated life he had never been before, at what love can do to the soul.
“Life’s for the young,” he said, “you’re right, Katherine. Your Mother will never forgive me, but I’ll help you.”
“No,” Katherine said, “you’re not to be involved, Uncle Tim. Mother mustn’t lose anyone afterwards. You’re to know nothing about it. I shall leave a note with someone to be taken up to the house at half-past nine. I’ve told you because I wanted you to know, but you’re not to have anything to do with it. But you’ll love me just the same, won’t you? You won’t be any different, will you? I had to know that. With you and Millie and Aunt Betty and Father caring for me afterwards, it won’t be quite like breaking with the family. Only, Uncle Tim, I want you to do for me what you can with Mother. I’ve explained everything to you, so that you can tell her—show her.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said. Then he caught her and hugged her.
“Good luck,” he said—and she was gone.
Although she had been less than her hour with her uncle, she knew that she had no time to spare. She was haunted, as she hurried back again down the village road by alarms, regrets, agonising reproaches that she refused to admit. She fortified her consciousness against everything save the immediate business to which she had bound herself, but every tree upon the road, every hideous cottage, every stone and flower besieged her with memories. “You are leaving us for ever. Why? For Panic?... For Panic?” ... She could hear the voices that would follow the retreat. “But why did she run away like that? It wasn’t even as though their engagement had been forbidden. To be married all in a hurry and in secret—I don’t like the look of it.... She was always such a quiet, sensible girl.”
And she knew—it had not needed Uncle Tim’s words to show her—that this act of hers was uprooting her for ever from everything that had made life for her. She would never go back. More deeply than that, she would never belong again, she, who only six months ago had been the bond that had held them all together....
And behind these thoughts were two figures so strangely, so impossibly like one another—the first that woman, suddenly old, leaning back on to Katherine’s breast, fast asleep, tired out, her mother—the second that woman who, only that afternoon, had turned and given both Katherine and Philip that look of triumph.... “I’ve got you both—You see that I shall never let you go. You cannot, cannot, cannot, escape.” That also was her mother.
She stopped at the village inn, ‘The Three Pilchards’, saw Dick Penhaligan, the landlord, and an old friend of hers.