That afternoon Delia sent a telegram to Lady Tonbridge who had returned to Maumsey—"Can you and Nora come and stay with me for three months. I shall be quite alone." She also despatched a note to Winnington's club, simply to say that she was going home tomorrow. She had no recent news of Winnington's whereabouts, but something told her that he was still in town—still near her.
Then she turned with energy to practical affairs—arrangements for giving up the flat, dismissing some servants, despatching others to Maumsey. She had something of a gift for housekeeping, and on this evening of all others she blessed its tasks. When they met at dinner, Gertrude was perfectly placid and amiable. She went to bed early, and Delia spent the hours after dinner in packing, with her maid. In the middle of it came a line from Winnington—"Good news indeed! I go down to Maumsey early, to see that the Abbey is ready for you. Don't bother about the flat. I have spoken to the Agents. They will do everything. Au revoir!"
The commonplace words somehow broke down her self-control. She sent away her maid, put out the glaring electric light, and sat crouched over the fire, in the darkness, thinking her heart out. Once she sprang up suddenly, her hands at her breast—"Oh Mark, Mark—I'm coming back to you, Mark,—I'm coming back—I'm free!"—in an ecstasy.
But only to feel herself the next moment, quenched—coerced—her happiness dashed from her. If she gave herself to Mark, her knowledge, her suspicions, her practical certainty must go with the gift. She could not keep from him her growing belief that Monk Lawrence was vitally threatened, and that Gertrude, in spite of audacious denials, was still madly bent upon the plot. And to tell him would mean instant action on his part: arrest—prison—perhaps death—for this woman she had adored, whom she still loved with a sore, disillusioned tenderness. She could not tell him!—and therefore she could not engage herself to him. Had Gertrude realised that?—counted upon it?
No. She must work in other ways—through Mr. Lathrop—through various members of the "Daughters" Executive who were personally known to her. Gertrude must be restrained—somehow—by those who still had influence with her.
The loneliness of that hour sank deep into Delia's soul. Never had she felt herself so motherless, so forlorn. Her passion for this elder woman during three years of fast-developing youth had divided her from all her natural friends. As for her relations, her father's sister, Elizabeth Blanchflower, a selfish, eccentric old maid, had just acknowledged her existence in two chilly notes since she returned to England; while Lord Frederick, Winnington's co-executor, had in the same period written her one letter of half-scolding, half-patronising advice, and sent a present of game to Maumsey. Since then she understood he had been pursuing his enemy the gout from "cure" to "cure," and "Mr. Mark" certainly had done all the executor's work that had not been mere formality.
She had no friends, no one who cared for her!—except Winnington—her chilled heart glowed to the name!—Lady Tonbridge, and poor Weston. Among the Daughters she had acquaintances, but no intimates. Gertrude had absorbed her; she had lived for Gertrude and Gertrude's ideas.
And now she was despised—cast out. She tried to revive in herself the old crusading flame—the hot unquestioning belief in Women's Rights and Women's Wrongs—the angry contempt for men as a race of coarse and hypocritical oppressors, which Gertrude had taught her. In vain. She sat there, with these altruistic loves and hates—premature, artificial things!—drooping away; conscious only, nakedly conscious, of the thirst for individual happiness, personal joy—ashamed of it too, in her bewildered youth!—not knowing that she was thereby best serving her sex and her race in the fore-ordained ways of destiny. And the wickedness of men? But to have watched a good man, day by day, had changed all the values of the human scene. Her time would come again—with fuller knowledge—for bitter loathing of the tyrannies of sex and lust. But this, in the natural order, was her hour for hope—for faith. As the night grew deeper, the tides of both rose and rose within her—washing her at last from the shores of Desolation. She was going home. Winnington would be there—her friend. Somehow, she would save Gertrude. Somehow—surely—she would find herself in Mark's arms again. She went to sleep with a face all tears, but whether for joy or sorrow, she could hardly have told.
Next morning Marion arrived early, and carried Gertrude off to Victoria, en route for Brighton. Gertrude and Delia kissed each other, and said Good-bye, without visible emotion.
"Of course I shall come down to plague you in the summer," said Gertrude, and Delia laughed assent—with Miss Andrews standing by. The girl went through a spasm of solitary weeping when Gertrude was finally gone; but she soon mastered it, and an hour later she herself was in the train.