And now she was despised--cast out. She tried to revive in herself the old crusading flame--the hot unquestioning belief in Women's Rights and Women's Wrongs--the angry contempt for men as a race of coarse and hypocritical oppressors, which Gertrude had taught her. In vain. She sat there, with these altruistic loves and hates--premature, artificial things!--drooping away; conscious only, nakedly conscious, of the thirst for individual happiness, personal joy--ashamed of it too, in her bewildered youth!--not knowing that she was thereby best serving her sex and her race in the fore-ordained ways of destiny. And the wickedness of men? But to have watched a good man, day by day, had changed all the values of the human scene. Her time would come again--with fuller knowledge--for bitter loathing of the tyrannies of sex and lust. But this, in the natural order, was her hour for hope--for faith. As the night grew deeper, the tides of both rose and rose within her--washing her at last from the shores of Desolation. She was going home. Winnington would be there--her friend. Somehow, she would save Gertrude. Somehow--surely--she would find herself in Mark's arms again. She went to sleep with a face all tears, but whether for joy or sorrow, she could hardly have told. Next morning Marion arrived early, and carried Gertrude off to Victoria, en route for Brighton. Gertrude and Delia kissed each other, and said Good-bye, without visible emotion. "Of course I shall come down to plague you in the summer," said Gertrude, and Delia laughed assent--with Miss Andrews standing by. The girl went through a spasm of solitary weeping when Gertrude was finally gone; but she soon mastered it, and an hour later she herself was in the train. Oh, the freshness of the February day--of the spring breathing everywhere!--of the pairing birds and the springing wheat--and the bright patches of crocuses and snowdrop in the gardens along the line. A rush of pleasure in the mere return to the country and her home, in the mere welling back of health, the escape from daily friction, and ugly, violent thoughts, overflowed all her young senses. She was a child on a holiday. The nightmare of the Raid--of those groups of fighting, dishevelled women, ignominiously overpowered, of the grinning crowd, the agonising pain of her arm, and the policeman's rough grip upon it--began to vanish "in black from the skies."