It seemed too easy a way out, she was thinking. If Innes was to be punished, the living of a dull and useful life hardly seemed a sufficient exaction. She had forfeited Arlinghurst of course; that would cost her something. But would it pay for a death?
What, in any case, would pay for a death? Except a death.
And Innes was offering what she obviously considered a living death. Perhaps after all it was not so poor an exchange.
What she, Lucy, was faced with was the fact that all her deliberations, her self-communing and comparing of arguments, fused at this moment into one single and simple issue: Was she going to condemn to death the girl who was standing in front of her?
It was, after all, as simple as that. If she took that little rosette to Henrietta this morning, Innes would die before the first students came back to Leys in the autumn. If she did not die she would spend her twenties in a living death that would indeed be "barren."
Let her spend her years in the prison of her choice, where she could be useful to her fellows.
Certainly she, Lucy Pym, was quite unequal to the task of condemning her.
And that was that.
"I am entirely in your hands," she said slowly to Innes, "because I am quite incapable of sending anyone to the gallows. I know what my plain duty is and I can't do it." Odd, she thought, that I should be in her reverence rather than she in mine.
Innes stared at her, doubtfully.