"There are places—sanatoriums, but they cost money."
"We haven't got the money, Elizabeth. And in any case, Mother's decided that Milly can't be seriously ill."
"I have some money, as you know, Joan, but I was saving it for you; still——" Her voice shook.
Joan sat down on the bed again and took Elizabeth's hand. "It's no good," she said gently.
And then Elizabeth cried. She did it with disconcerting suddenness and complete lack of restraint. It was terrible to Joan to see her thrown right off her guard like this; to feel her shoulders shake with sobs while the tears dripped through her fingers on to the bedspread.
She said: "Don't, oh, don't!"
But Elizabeth took no notice, she was launched on a veritable torrent of self-indulgence which she had no will to stem. The pent-up unhappiness of years gushed out at this moment. All the ambitions, the longings, the tenderness sternly repressed, the maternal instinct, the lover instinct, all the frustrations, they were all there, finding despairing expression as she sobbed. She rocked herself from side to side and backwards and forwards. She lost her breath with little gasps, but found it again immediately, and went on crying. She murmured in a kind of ecstatic anguish: "Oh! oh!—Oh! oh!" And then, "Joan, Joan, Joan!" But not for an instant did her tears cease.
Ralph heard the sound of sobbing as he passed on his way to bed, and a quiet, unhappy voice speaking very low, breaking off and then speaking again. He hesitated a moment, wondering if he should go in, but shook his head, and sighing, went on to his own room, closing the door noiselessly after him.
3
Two days later Joan was waiting in the matron's sitting-room at Alexandra House. Someone had told her that Miss Jackson wished to speak to her before she went up to her sister. She remembered that Miss Jackson was Milly's "Old Scout," and smiled in spite of herself.