"No, no," she said. "I've done it once. I can't do it all over again."
"I suppose," said Jane, "it is easier—not to see him."
At that Kitty clenched her hands.
"Easier?" she cried. "I'd give my soul to see him for one minute—one minute, Janey."
She turned, stifling her sobs on her pillow. They ceased, and the passion that was in her had its way then. She lay on her face, convulsed, biting into the pillow; gripping the sheets, tearing at them and wringing them in her hands. Her whole body writhed, shaken and tormented.
"Oh, go away!" she cried. "Go away. Don't look at me!"
But Jane did not go. She stood there by the bedside.
She had come to the end of her adventure. It was as if she had been brought there blindfold, carried past the border into the terrible, alien, unpenetrated lands. Her genius for exploration had never taken her within reasonable distance of them. She had turned back when the frontier was in sight, refusing all knowledge of the things that lay beyond. And here she was, in the very thick of it, at the heart of the unexplored, with her poor terrified eyes uncovered, her face held close to the thing she feared. And yet she had passed through the initiation without terror; she had held her hand in the strange fire and it had not hurt her. She felt only a great penetrating, comprehending, incorruptible pity for her sister who writhed there, consumed and tortured in the flame.
She knelt by the bedside and stretched out her arm and covered her, and Kitty lay still.
"You haven't gone?" she said.