"No, no, my dear child!" cried Lady Thomson. "Don't talk in this painful way. I can't imagine what you mean, Miss Timson. It all sounds dreadfully mad."
"I can explain the whole case to you perfectly," stated Tims, with eager confidence.
"I'd better go away," gasped Milly between her convulsive sobs. "I can't bear any more. But Aunt Beatrice must know now. Tell her what you like, only—only it isn't true."
Milly fled to her bedroom; the long, low room, so perfect in its simplicity, its windows looking away into the sunshine over the pleasant boughs of orchards and garden-plots and the gray shingled roofs of old houses—the room from which on that November evening Milly's spirit had been absent while Ian, the lover whom she had never known, had watched his Beloved, the Desire of his soul and sense, returning to him from the unimagined limbo to which she had again withdrawn.
CHAPTER XX
When Ian came back from the Bodleian Library, where he was working, he heard voices talking in raised tones before he entered the drawing-room. He found no Milly there, but Lady Thomson and Miss Timson seated at the extreme ends of the same sofa and engaged in a heated discussion.
"It can't be true," Lady Thomson was stating firmly. "If it were, what becomes of Personal Immortality?"
Miss Timson had just time to convey the fact that Personal Immortality was not the affair of a woman of science, before she rose to greet Ian, which she did effusively.