"If I could have kept her to myself for another year, he could have done nothing. But he has intervened before her opinions were anything more than the echoes of mine;--and for the future I shall have less and less chance against him. What shall we ever get out of her as a married woman? What would Mark Winnington--to whom she will give herself, body and soul,--allow us to get out of her? Better break with her now, and disentangle my own life!" With such thoughts, a pale and brooding woman pursued the now distant figure of Delia. At the same time Gertrude Marvell had no intention whatever of provoking a premature breach which might deprive either the Cause or herself of any help they might still obtain from Delia in the desperate fight immediately ahead. She, personally, would have infinitely preferred freedom and a garret to Delia's flat, and any kind of dependence on Delia's money. "I was not born to be a parasite!" she angrily thought. But she had no right to prefer them. All that could be extracted from Delia should be extracted. She was now no more to Gertrude than a pawn in the game. Let her be used--if she could not be trusted! But if this had fallen differently, if she had remained the true sister-in-arms, given wholly to the joy of the fight, Gertrude's stern soul would have clasped her to itself, just as passionately as it now dismissed her. "No matter!" The hard brown eyes looked steadily into the future. "That's done with. I am alone--I shall be alone. What does it signify?--a little sooner or later?" The vagueness of the words matched the vagueness of certain haunting premonitions in the background of the mind. Her own future always shaped itself in tragic terms. It was impossible--she knew it--that it should bring her to any kind of happiness. It was no less impossible that she should pause and submit. That active defiance of the existing order, on which she had entered, possessed her, gripped her, irrevocably. She was like the launched stone which describes its appointed curve--till it drops. As for any interference from the side of her own personal ties and affections,--she had none. In her pocket she carried a letter she had received that morning, from her mother. It was plaintive, as usual.