“Is no accident likely to happen between this and Monday?”
“None whatever. The marriage is a certainty.”
“A certainty?”
“Yes.”
“Good-night.”
She put her hand out through the door. He took it with some little surprise; it was not often in his experience that she gave him her hand of her own accord.
“You have sat up too long,” he said, as he felt the clasp of her cold fingers. “I am afraid you will have a bad night—I’m afraid you will not sleep.”
She softly closed the door.
“I shall sleep,” she said, “sounder than you think for.”
It was past two o’clock when she shut herself up alone in her room. Her chair stood in its customary place by the toilet-table. She sat down for a few minutes thoughtfully, then opened her letter to Norah, and turned to the end where the blank space was left. The last lines written above the space ran thus: “... I have laid my whole heart bare to you; I have hidden nothing. It has come to this. The end I have toiled for, at such terrible cost to myself, is an end which I must reach or die. It is wickedness, madness, what you will—but it is so. There are now two journeys before me to choose between. If I can marry him—the journey to the church. If the profanation of myself is more than I can bear—the journey to the grave!”