What was she to do? Betray her friend?--go to Winnington for help? But he was a magistrate. If such a plot were really on foot--and Lathrop was himself convinced that petroleum and explosives were already stored somewhere in the neighbourhood of the house--Winnington could only treat such a thing as a public servant, as a guardian of the law. Any appeal to him to let private interests--even _her_ interests--interfere, would, she felt certain, be entirely fruitless. Once go to him, the police must be informed--it would be his clear duty; and if such proofs of the plot existed as Lathrop believed, Gertrude would be arrested, and her accomplices. Including Delia herself? That possibility, instead of frightening her, gave the girl some momentary comfort. For that _might_ perhaps secure Winnington's silence? But no!--her common sense dismissed the notion. Winnington would discover at once that she had had no connection whatever with the business. Lathrop's evidence alone would be enough. And that being so, her confession would simply hand Gertrude over to Winnington's conscience. And Mark Winnington's conscience was a thing to fear. And yet the yearning to go to him--like the yearning of an unhappy child--was so strong. Traitor!--yes, _traitor_!--double-dyed. And pausing just outside the village, at a field gate, Delia leant over it, gazing into the lowering sky, and piteously crying to some power beyond--some God, "if any Zeus there be," on whom the heart in its trouble might throw itself. Her thought ran backwards and forwards over the past months and years. The burning moments of revolt through which she had lived--the meetings of the League with their multitudes of faces, strained, fierce faces, alive, many of them, with hatreds new to English life, new perhaps to civilised history,--and the intermittent gusts of pity and fury which had swept through her own young ignorance as she listened, making a hideous thing of the future and of human fate:--she lived through them all again. Individual personalities recurred to her, the wild looks of delicate, frenzied women, who had lost health, employment, and the love of friends--suffered in body, mind and estate for this "cause" to which she too had vowed herself. Was she alone to desert, to fail--both the cause and her friend, who had taught her everything? "It's not my will--not my _will_--that shrinks"--she moaned to herself. "If I _believed_--if I still believed!" But why was the fire gone out of the old faiths, the savour from the old hopes? Was she less moved by the sufferings, the toils, the weakness of her sex? She could remember nights of weeping over the wrongs of women, after an impassioned evening with Gertrude. And now--had the heart of flesh become a heart of stone? Was she no longer worthy of the great crusade, the vast upheaval?