'She is going to a hospital near Manchester. They want a V.A.D. housemaid.'
Farrell rose impatiently, and stretching out his hand for his pipe, began to pace the room, steeped evidently in disagreeable reflection.
'You know as well as I do'—he said at last—that she hasn't the physical strength for it.'
'Well then she'll break down, and we can put her to bed. But try she will, and I entirely approve of it,' said Cicely firmly. 'Hard physical work—till you drop—till you're so tired, you must go to sleep—that's the only thing when you're as miserable as poor Nelly. You know it is, Will. Don't you remember that poor Mrs. Henessy whose son died here? Her letters to me afterwards used to be all about scrubbing. If she could scrub from morning till night, she could just get along. She scrubbed herself sane again. The bigger the floor, the better she liked it. When bedtime came, she just slept like a log. And at last she got all right. But it was touch-and-go when she left here.'
'She was a powerfully-built woman,' said Farrell gloomily.
'Oh, well, it isn't always the strapping ones that come through. Anyway, old boy, I'm afraid you can't do anything to alter it.'
She looked at him a little askance. It was perfectly understood between them that Cicely was more or less acquainted with her brother's plight, and since her engagement to Marsworth had been announced it was astonishing how much more ready Farrell had been to confide in her, and she to be confided in.
But for her few days in France, however, with Nelly Sarratt, Marsworth might still have had some wrestles to go through with Cicely. At the very moment when Farrell's telephone message arrived, imploring her to take charge of Nelly on her journey, Cicely was engaged in fresh quarrelling with her long-suffering lover. But the spectacle of Sarratt's death, and Nelly's agony, together with her own quick divination of Nelly's inner mind, had worked profoundly on Cicely, and Marsworth had never shewn himself a better fellow than in his complete sympathy with her, and his eager pity for the Sarratts. 'I haven't the heart to tease him'—Cicely had said candidly after her return to England. 'He's been so horribly nice to me!' And the Petruchio having once got the upper hand, the Katherine was—like her prototype—almost overdoing it. The corduroy trousers, Russian boots, the flame-coloured jersey actually arrived. Cicely looked at them wistfully and locked them up. As to the extravagances that still remained, in hats, or skirts, or head-dressing, were they to be any further reduced, Marsworth would probably himself implore her not to be too suddenly reasonable. For, without them, Cicely would be only half Cicely.
But his sister's engagement, perhaps, had only made Farrell feel more sharply than ever the collapse of his own hopes. Three days after Sarratt's death Nelly had written to him to give him George's dying message, and to thank him on her own account for all that he had done to help her journey. The letter was phrased as Nelly could not help phrasing anything she wrote. Cicely, to whom Nelly dumbly shewed it, thought it 'sweet.' But on Farrel's morbid state, it struck like ice, and he had the greatest difficulty in writing a letter of sympathy, such as any common friend must send her, in return. Every word seemed to him either too strong or too weak. The poor Viking, indeed, had begun to look almost middle-aged, and Cicely with a pang had discovered or fancied some streaks of grey in the splendid red beard and curly hair. At the same time her half-sarcastic sense perceived that he was far better provided than Nelly, with the means of self-protection against his trouble. 'Men always are,' thought Cicely—'they have so much more interesting things to do.' And she compared the now famous hospital, with its constant scientific developments, the ever-changing and absorbing spectacle of the life within it, and Farrell's remarkable position amid its strenuous world—with poor Nelly's 'housemaiding.'
But Nelly was choosing the path that suited her own need, and in the spiritual world, the humblest means may be the best. It was when she was cooking for her nuns that some of St. Teresa's divinest ecstasies came upon her! Not that there was any prospect of ecstasy for Nelly Sarratt. She seemed to herself to be engaged in a kind of surgery—the cutting or burning away of elements in herself that she had come to scorn. Hester, who was something of a saint herself, came near to understanding her. Cicely could only wonder. But Hester perceived, with awe, a fierceness in Nelly—a kind of cruelty—towards herself, with which she knew well, from a long experience of human beings, that it was no use to argue. The little, loving, easy-going thing had discovered in her own gentleness and weakness, the source of something despicable—that is, of her own failure to love George as steadfastly and truly as he had loved her. The whole memory of her marriage was poisoned for her by this bitter sense that in little more than a year after she had lost him, while he was actually still alive, and when the law even, let alone the highest standards of love, had not released her, she had begun to yield to the wooing of another man. Perhaps only chance, under all the difficult circumstances of her intimacy with Farrell, had saved her from a shameful yielding—from dishonour, as well as a broken faith.