“Are you my mother, Ellen? Tell me the truth. I’ll never leave here until I hear the truth. I’ll search this room, every inch of it.” But she did not need her answer in words. Ellen’s strength was gone. Her mouth gibbered and her face ran tears. The girl sat down heavily, as though she were facing a job that had to be got over with. She never doubted the truth after that first glimpse of it, never tried to find a loophole. There were simply details to be heard, the future to be considered. She must get the whole story from Ellen, talk it over, make some decision. It would be half the night before she was through with it, and she hated it.... The sun had, in fact, appeared when she emerged from the little room, with a strange tale in her possession, pieced together from the incoherent reminiscences of Ellen. She had forgiven Mrs. Seymour, forgiven her real mother, forgiven all of them for the deception. It was only herself that she could not forgive, herself, humiliated by the degrading masquerade of twenty years. The knowledge that gave her most courage was her illegitimacy--which was clear from Ellen’s reticence. Better that a thousand times, better a complete outcast, than a respectable nobody. She would go, of course, go in secret, that day. She could take the fewest possible things, put them in her car when no one was looking, and drive to town. What money she needed to get established elsewhere she would have to take from her own account at the bank, as a loan. Ellen had been sworn to say nothing of the discovery. She stood at her window watching the first sun gild the tops of the knolls, drive the low-lying mists slowly before it. This great knee of a hill, this Penthesilea’s knee, had been a mother’s knee to her, more truly than any human one. There were no relationships in Nature, and this, the memory of her youth, could not be taken from her.... But it would be long before she would see the morning rise from that window again, and she lingered over it; not sentimentally. Why couldn’t she feel sad? Why was she so hard--why had she been so cruel to Ellen? She could hear her now pleading that she had given up Moira for her good, pleading the advantages that had come to them by the sacrifice. Empty advantages, thought their possessor, immorally got and useless to her now, just so many more things to bid good-bye to. The only thing that counted was Hal; if she was bitter it was because she feared yielding to that. Fate had thrown her to Hal and snatched her away in the moment of realization.... She turned from the full day flooding the window and went to her desk. She wanted to write to him now, while she was strongest.