'No; of course. You won't come back till the autumn, when it's cooler, I expect.'
The two looks met, the one faintly questioning and half asking pardon for the question, the other with all its depth of sad bewilderment stirred—a miserable gaze like a child's.
'I don't know,' said Betty, and bit her lip. Then quite suddenly the depths surged up and broke through. Her sad eyes hung on the lucid grey ones that looked with such gentleness at her. 'I don't know—oh, I don't know.... I don't know what we can do ... how we're to do it.... Can't you tell me?... Because it's been you, you know, who've spoilt things.... And what next?'
Prudence accepted it, meeting the claim with puckered brows of thought. She did not know what next. She was an idealist, of a continual and never-failing hope; but, striving to see, she saw only roads running eternally sundered, as Betty too had seen them from the first hour of comprehension.
Betty said again, half to herself, how they were spoilt, the old things. 'And what new things can there be, ever, for us?' On Prudence, who had done her share of the spoiling, she still made her stammering claim, blind-eyed, without hope.
Prudence's response to it was a doubting question.
'If they're spoilt then ... you'll leave them?'
Betty's eyes hung on hers.
'You mean not come back here? Oh, we don't want to; I've told you that's spoilt. But where else?... Tommy couldn't get anything to do at Santa Caterina.'
Prudence said there were other places in Italy for a journalist. Or perhaps even England.... But at that Betty shook her head. No spoilt things should drive her to that place of damp half-lights.