The commonplace words somehow broke down her self-control. She sent away her maid, put out the glaring electric light, and sat crouched over the fire, in the darkness, thinking her heart out. Once she sprang up suddenly, her hands at her breast--"Oh Mark, Mark--I'm coming back to you, Mark,--I'm coming back--I'm _free!_"--in an ecstasy. But only to feel herself the next moment, quenched--coerced--her happiness dashed from her. If she gave herself to Mark, her knowledge, her suspicions, her practical certainty must go with the gift. She could not keep from him her growing belief that Monk Lawrence was vitally threatened, and that Gertrude, in spite of audacious denials, was still madly bent upon the plot. And to tell him would mean instant action on his part: arrest--prison--perhaps death--for this woman she had adored, whom she still loved with a sore, disillusioned tenderness. She could not tell him!--and therefore she could not engage herself to him. Had Gertrude realised that?--counted upon it? No. She must work in other ways--through Mr. Lathrop--through various members of the "Daughters" Executive who were personally known to her. Gertrude must be restrained--somehow--by those who still had influence with her. The loneliness of that hour sank deep into Delia's soul. Never had she felt herself so motherless, so forlorn. Her passion for this elder woman during three years of fast-developing youth had divided her from all her natural friends. As for her relations, her father's sister, Elizabeth Blanchflower, a selfish, eccentric old maid, had just acknowledged her existence in two chilly notes since she returned to England; while Lord Frederick, Winnington's co-executor, had in the same period written her one letter of half-scolding, half-patronising advice, and sent a present of game to Maumsey. Since then she understood he had been pursuing his enemy the gout from "cure" to "cure," and "Mr. Mark" certainly had done all the executor's work that had not been mere formality. She had no friends, no one who cared for her!--except Winnington--her chilled heart glowed to the name!--Lady Tonbridge, and poor Weston. Among the Daughters she had acquaintances, but no intimates. Gertrude had absorbed her; she had lived for Gertrude and Gertrude's ideas.