Presently, as she settled down to quieter breathing, there came to her a strange sensation, that grew till it became an unusually vivid perception of the outer world; a perception mingled with a still stranger double vision, a sense that seemed to be born in the dark of the brain and to be moving there to a foregone conclusion. And all the time her eyes were busy, now with a bush of May in crimson blossom, now with the many-pointed leaves of a sycamore pricked against the blue; now with the straight rectangular paths that made the park an immense mathematical diagram. From where she sat her eyes swept the length of the wide walk that cuts the green from east to west. Far down at the west end was a seat, and she could see two people, a man and a woman, sitting on it; they must have been there a quarter of an hour or more; she had noticed them ever since she came into the park.
They had risen, and her gaze left everything else to follow them; or rather, it went to meet them, for they had turned and were coming slowly eastward now. They had stopped; they were facing each other, and her gaze rested with them, fascinated yet uncertain. And now she could see nothing else; the park, with the regions beyond it and the sky above it, had become merely a setting for one man and one woman; the avenue, fresh strewn with red golden gravel, led up to them and ended there at their feet; a young poplar trembled in the wind and shook its silver green fans above them in delicate confusion. The next minute a light went up in that obscure and prophetic background of her brain; and she saw Rhoda Vivian and Bastian Cautley coming towards her, greeting her, with their kind faces shining.
She rose, turned from them, and went slowly home.
It was the last rent in the veil of illusion that Rhoda had spun so well. Up till then Miss Quincey had seen only half the truth. Now she had seen the whole, with all that Rhoda had disguised and kept hidden from her; the truth that kills or cures.
Miss Quincey did not go out again that day, but sat all afternoon silent in her chair. Towards evening she became talkative and stayed up later than had been her wont since she recovered her freedom. She seemed to be trying to make up to her aunt for a want of sociability in the past.
At eleven she got up and stood before the Old Lady in the attitude of a penitent. Apparently she had been seized with a mysterious impulse of confession.
"Aunt," she said, "there's something I want to say to you."
She paused, casting about in her mind for the sins she had committed.
They were three in all.
"I am afraid I have been very extravagant"—she was thinking of the blouse—"and—and very foolish"—she was thinking of Bastian Cautley—"and very selfish"—she was thinking of her momentary desire to die.
"Juliana, if you're worrying about that money"—the Old Lady was thinking of nothing else—"don't. I've plenty for us both. As long as we can keep together I don't care what I eat, nor what I drink, nor what I put on my poor back. And if the worst comes to the worst I'll sell the furniture."