But when the morning came I could not be sure that Betty was dead.  
They brought me a telegram.
 
In wrenching¹ the envelope off I tore the message twice. My fingers could hardly piece the signature together. I realised, at last, the Duncombe housemaid's name. My mother was sinking, she said; and we were expected back by the night train.
 
The message had been sent an hour after we left home. It reached Lowndes Square seven hours before I had come beating at the door. That it had lain in the hall forgotten seemed to me hardly to matter now. Not even to-day could I go home.
 
I seemed to see the future. If my mother had not died in the night, the end would very quickly come. There was mercy there.
 
As for me—I knew I should not die till I was sure that Betty was out of the world. As though[Pg 330] to our best, our only friend, I turned to the thought of her physical weakness.
 
But I must be sure. I rose up out of my bed ... and Darkness took me in her arms.
 
I was ill a long, long while.
 
Whenever a time came that found me free of fever, able to think again, what could I think except that, even if Betty were dead—there were the others.
 
The unhappy man had said that always, always there were others.
 
So I had seen "the need" wrong. The lamp of a young girl's hope, held up in her little world, to help her to find a mate—that light was pale beside the red glare of this fierce demand from men.
 
And the people who knew least went on saying it wasn't true. And the people who knew most said: there are many thousand "lost sisters" in London.
 
Who would help me to find mine?—or to sleep once more, knowing Bettina safely dead!
 
Nothing to hope from the foggy, self-bemused mystic, whose face alternated with that of the nurse in and out of my dreaming and my waking.[Pg 331] Long ago she had turned away from service, even from knowledge. There was "no evil, except as a figment of mortal mind." Peace! peace!—and this battle nightly at her gate! Just once her doors burst open, and she was made aware. The sound would soon be faint in her ears, and then would cease.
 
Who else?
 
Not her friend, the Healer—whose way of healing was to look away from the wound.
 
Could I trust even Eric to help? The man who had set his work before his love—who had said: "If all the people in the house were dying, if the house were falling about my ears and I thought I was 'getting it'—I'd let the house fall and the folks die and go on tracking the Secret home." Even if that were not quite seriously meant, no more than all the other good men and true, would that one leave the lesser² task and set himself to cure this cancer at the heart of the world.
 
Eric, and all the rest (this it was that crushed hope out of my heart)—they all knew.
 
And they accepted this thing.
 
That was the thought that again and again tore[Pg 332] me out of my bed, and brought the great Darkness down.
 
In the grey intervals³ I was conscious of Mrs. Harborough's being more and more in the room. I came to look for her.
 
She spoke⁴ sometimes of my father. She imagined I was like him. To think that made her very gentle and, I believe, brought her a kind of light.
 
I wondered about the doctor. How had she been brought to have someone tending me who did not call himself a Healer, yet who I felt might well have cured any malady⁵ but mine?
 
She had forbidden the nurse to talk to me about my sister, so that I was the more surprised the day Mrs. Harborough spoke of Betty of her own accord. "If you will try to get strong," she said, "I will tell you what has been done to find her. And when you are really well I will do all that any one woman can to help."
 
So we talked a little—just a little now and then, about the things I thought of endlessly. And not vaguely⁶ either. She saw how vagueness maddened me. We faced things. How she had misunderstood[Pg 333] my mother. That could never be made up now. My mother never knew why w............