If Miss Carew had been in the room she would probably not have understood that anything special was going on. Molly moved quietly about, collecting together on a little table by the cupboard, rings, brooches, buckles, watches—anything of much value. She sought and found the key of the little safe in the wardrobe and put away these objects with the large jewel cases already inside it. She also put with them her cheque book and her banker's book. A very small cheque book on a different bank where the interest of the £2000 had not been drawn on for six months, she put down on her writing table. Then she looked round the room. Was there nothing there really her own, and that she cared to keep either for its own sake or because it had belonged to someone she had loved? An awful sense of loneliness swept over her as she looked round and could think of nothing. Each beautiful thing on walls or tables that she looked at seemed repulsive in its turn, for it had either belonged to Madame Danterre or been bought with her money. There was not so much as a letter which she cared ever to see again. She had burnt Edmund's few notes when she first came to Westmoreland House.
She had once met a woman who had lost everything in a fire. "I have everything new," she wailed, "nothing that I ever had before—not a photograph, not a prayer-book, nor an old letter. I don't feel that I am the same person." The words came back now. "Not the same person," and suddenly a sense of relief began to dawn upon her.
"Alone to land upon that shore
With not one thing that we have known before."
Oh, the immensity of such a mercy! That hymn had made her shiver as a child; how different it seemed now! Molly knelt down by the couch, and her shoulders trembled as a tempest of feeling came over her. Criminals hardened by long lives of fraud have been known to be happier after being found out—simply because the strain was over. They had destroyed their moral sense. Molly's conscience was alive, though torn, bleeding, and debased. She could not be happy as they were, but yet there was the lifting of the weight as of a great mountain rolled away. She was afraid of the immense sense of relief that now seemed coming upon her. Could she really become free of the horrible Molly of the last months—this noxious, vile, lying, thieving woman? What an awful strain that woman had lived in! She had told Mark that what frightened her was the thought that she would still be herself. She longed now to cut away everything that had belonged to her. Might she not by God's grace, in poverty and hard work, with everything around her quite different from the past, might she not quite do to death the Molly who had lived in Westmoreland House? The cry was more passionate than spiritual perhaps, but the longing had its power to help. She rose and again moved quietly about the room of the dead, bad woman, which must be left in order for the new owners. She put some things together—what was necessary for a night or two—and felt almost glad that she had a comb and brush she had not yet used. There was a bag with cheap fittings Mrs. Carteret had given her as a girl, which would hold all she needed. And then she remembered that she had something she would like to take away; it was a nurse's apron, and in its pocket a nurse's case of small instruments. They were what she used when nursing with the district nurse in the village at home. Then she sat down and wrote a cheque and a note, and proceeded to take them downstairs. The cheque was for £30 out of the little Dexter cheque book, and the note was an abrupt little line to tell a friend that she could not dine out that night. She "did not feel up to it" was the only excuse given, and a furious hostess declared that Miss Dexter had become perfectly insufferable. She seemed to think that she could do exactly as she chose because she was absurdly rich.
The butler was able to give Molly £30 in notes and cash, and it was his opinion that she wanted the money for playing cards that night. Molly crept upstairs again with a foreign Bradshaw in her hand. She looked out the train for the night boat to Dieppe. It left Charing Cross at 9.45. She had chosen Dieppe for the first stage of her journey—of which she knew not the further direction—for two reasons. The first was because she knew that she ought to stay within reach if it were necessary for her to do business with her own or Lady Rose's solicitors. She was determined not to give any trouble she could avoid giving, in the business of handing over that which had never belonged to her. At this time of year the journey to Dieppe would be no difficulty, and she wanted to go there rather than to Boulogne or any other French port, because she had the address of a very cheap and clean pension in which Miss Carew had passed some weeks before coming to live with Molly in London. From that pension Molly could write the letters she felt physically incapable of writing to-night. The only note she determined to write at once was to Carey, asking her to remain at Westmoreland House and to tell the servants that Miss Dexter had gone abroad. She told her that she had gone to the pension at Dieppe, but earnestly insisted that she should not follow her. She begged her to do nothing before getting a letter that she would write to her at once on arriving at Dieppe. She also asked her to keep the key of the safe which she enclosed in her letter. Molly sealed the letter, and then felt some hesitation as to when and how to give it to Miss Carew. She finally decided to send it by a messenger boy from the station when it would be too late for Miss Carew to follow her, and when it would still be in time to prevent any astonishment at her not returning home that night.
Miss Carew, thinking that Molly had gone out to dinner, came into her bed-room to look for a book. The night was hot and oppressive, but no one had raised the blinds since the sun had set, and the room was so dark that she did not at once see Molly. She started nervously, half expecting one of Molly's impatient and rude exclamations on being disturbed, and, with an apology, was going away when Molly said gently:
"Stay a minute, Carey; I'm not going to dine out to-night."
"But there is no dinner ordered, and I have just had supper. I am going out this evening to see a friend."
"Never mind," Molly interrupted, "I can't eat anything. I am going out for a drive in a hansom in the cool. Would you mind saying that I shall not want the motor?"