Tony's wedding-day was fixed. He did not love _her_ now. By and by, when she was grown-up, she would meet him, and make him care for her again, if she didn't die first. Why not drown herself in the pond in the wood? Una pictured the plunge, the stillness, and herself and her hair floating on the top, like `The Christian Martyr.' But Amethyst did not love her now. How should she? Her life was a ruin too; dying would be much better for them both. Una thought again of the cool dark pond in the wood, with a sense of desire; but her exceeding weariness and languor kept her still. It was not worth while to get up, even to commit suicide. As she lay still, getting a dreary sort of amusement out of these miserable fancies, she saw Amethyst come out of the house, walk slowly across the brown scorched grass, and sit down on one of the chairs, without noticing her sister's presence. She sat perfectly still, with a hard unsmiling face, at variance with the gay trim dress in which she had been entertaining some recent visitors. They were gone, and she could sit still now, and think--think the bitter thoughts in which her cruel disappointment took form. All that she had lost, still more all that she now had left, passed before her mind, and was weighed in the balance. She had no illusions now. Perhaps the bitterest drop was not so much the loss of Lucian, as the sense that he ought to have read her more truly. He himself had failed her. As for her mother, her eyes were as clear as Tory's; and her heart, how hard and bitter! And the days had to go on. It was not only that she was _not_ Lucian's happy wife, she _was_ Amethyst Haredale, with parents whom she despised, and a house in which no good thing could flourish; and yet, her aunt's anxious entreaty to join her as soon as she would, had no attraction for her. Religion--goodness? Mrs Leigh and Lucian were good and religious, and had cruelly misjudged her. Were good people really much better than bad ones? She had thought herself religious; but she had got below all the religion that she had ever experienced, and with the distrust of all earthly love, came also distrust of the Divine love, from which she had scarcely distinguished it. Amethyst was one of those, to whom trouble comes, not only in vague and overwhelming feelings, but in keen sharp thoughts; and, young as she was, her thoughts hit life's hard problems like well-aimed arrows. "Well, Amethyst, do you think, now, there's any good in being good?" Una's voice, with a hard ring through its weary languor, roused her with a start. "Una! Why do you lie there in the sun? It's very bad for you!" she said petulantly. "Suppose it is, what does it matter? There's nothing doing, and nothing worth living for, that I can see. You can't say there is." "You ought not to say things like that, Una," said Amethyst. "It is not right."