“Never!” she cried again. “I would rather die! My ignominy in his eyes is eternal. It would drag him down. He is too good to have a millstone like that tied around his neck.”
Yet the longing swept through her again, and her mind swayed to and fro. The hours crept on. She refused an offer of food made her by the servant. She felt as if it would choke her. She would ring if she wanted any later.
What was she to do? Her aching head throbbed as if it would burst. Hockmaster's note met her glance. She read it again. And this time she smoothed it out and replaced it slowly on the table. Her anger was dulled by despair. Nothing remained of her vehement indignation. It was the back-swing of the pendulum.
What was she to do? Raine she could never meet face to face. Yet the whole woman in her yearned to meet him. She must cut herself adrift, vanish wholly from his life. Destiny seemed to point out the course she must follow. She sat down, her chin in her hands, brooding over it until the sense of fatefulness numbed her mind. Fate had brought her back this other from the dark back ward of time. He had changed her life once. Was it not meant that he should fulfil the work he had begun? She must marry him. Raine would be saved. It would be a life of sadness, self-sacrifice. But then women were born for it.
Like many another woman, she was driven by an hour's despair to commit herself to a life-long unhappiness. She had counted the cost, and, unlike a man, blindly resolved to pay it. It is part of a woman's nature to trust herself to the irreparable. Katherine went to her table and wrote two letters—one to each man. The pen flew quickly, her intelligence illuminated by a false light. She sealed them, rang the bell, despatched them by the servant. It was done. She had burned her ships, committed herself irrevocably. A period of dull calm followed, during which she pretended to eat some food that she ordered, and read unintelligently an article in a review. But at last the words swam before her eyes. The review fell to the ground. The agony of her life came upon her, and she broke down utterly.
Felicia in the next room was humming an air. She had returned from her walk with Raine and was taking off her things. If she had been called upon suddenly to name the air, it would have slipped like a waking dream from her memory. The mingled altruistic and personal feelings of the past two hours had lifted her into an exalted mood, which was not altogether joyous. She was passing through one of those rare moments, when a young impressionable girl lives spiritually, without definite consciousness of personal needs, in a certain music of the soul. A sexual manifestation transcendentalized, if one pushes inquiry to the root of things. The magic of her sex had drawn the pain from a strong man's eyes and had touched his inner self.
Suddenly a sound struck upon her ear and the song died upon her lips. She listened, puzzled. It came again, a moan and a choking sob. Already somewhat overwrought, she held her breath, instinctively seeking some clue of association. She grasped it with a rush of emotion. Once she had heard that cry before, from a woman's depths, on the evening of poor little Miss Bunter's tragedy.
It was Katherine, on the other side of the wooden partition, crying her heart out. Fibres within the girl were strangely stirred, filling her with a great, yearning pity. At some moments of their lives women can touch the stars. Moved by an uncontrollable impulse she went out, knocked at Katherine's door and entered.
Katherine rose, looked at her half-bewildered; then the magnetism of the sympathy in Felicia's eyes and impulsively outstretched arms attracted her involuntarily. She made a step forward, and, with a little cry, half-sob, half-welcome, gave herself up to Felicia's clasp.
“I heard you. I had to come,” said Felicia. Katherine did not reply. For a long time they sat together without speaking, the elder woman's misery turned to sadness by the sweet and sudden tenderness. She cried softly in the girl's arms.