The effort she was forced to make when the servant entered with her meal, and the physical strength given her by the warm soup, restored calm and order in her mind. She read Raine's letter through once more. It inspired her with sad, despairing courage. She became for the time the Katherine she had been so long, hopeless, resigned, fatalistic. Before she crept broken and exhausted into bed, she had written him a long calm letter telling him all. She did not spare herself, hiding behind sophistries, neither did she blacken herself like a remorseful Magdalen. She wrote it with her heart's blood, at the dictates of her highest self. Only once perhaps in a lifetime is the power given to human beings to lay thus bare their souls as they appear before the eyes of the high gods. It was a higher Katherine than she wot of, that had written that letter. But in the morning, the human woman yearning dumbly for happiness beheld it, addressed, stamped, ready for post, and her heart was ice within her. She stood for a moment holding it in her hand, irresolute whether to break the seal and read it over again. Perhaps, she weakly thought, something in it might be better expressed. Her finger mechanically sought the flap corner of the envelope, and she tore it slowly. Then she went back to bed with the letter. Nothing could be altered. She would readdress it and despatch it that day. Whilst dressing she paused at her reflection in the glass, with a feminine catch at the heart. She looked pale, old, faded, she thought; faint lines were around the corners of her eyes; her features seemed pinched. She shivered slightly--hurried foolishly over her hair, so that she could be spared the sight of her face as soon as possible. “After all,” she said to herself, bitterly, “what does it matter? When that letter has gone, who in the world will care whether you look old or young?” Life seemed to end for her from the moment the letter would fall from her hands into the letter-box. She kept it by her all day, unable to cut herself adrift. The small extra effort required to address a fresh envelope just raised the task above her strength. Once during the day she flung herself on the bed in a fit of sobbing. She could not send it. It would spoil his trip. She would wait till he returned, till she had seen his eye light up once more as he looked at her, and heard, for one last time, the throb in his voice that she was never to hear again. Just one more hour of happiness. Then she would give him the letter, stay by him as he read it, as a penance for her present pusillanimity. Feeling miserably guilty, yet glad of the respite, she wrote him the second letter that he had received. The one that she was to have sent she carried about with her in her pocket, until the outside grew soiled and dogs-eared.