Dear old Justin!... ‘You see—I have to be out.’ So exactly what Justin might have been reckoned upon to say.... Her lips quivered: her shoulders shook: she was in desperate danger of laughing aloud. She saw so clearly the absurdity of their situation that it was all at once naked of its embarrassment, of its sting. She wanted to share the joke with him, but that was impossible. He would not have been Justin if he could have seen the funny side of himself. ‘You see—I have to be out.’... ‘Yes, Justin dear—Yes, Justin, dear—I quite understand!’ she crooned to herself with wicked, bright-eyed merriment. “And the next day,” continued his unconsciousness, “I go back, you know.” The bells stopped ringing. “Oh!” said Laura sedately. The circle of light had grown into an arch that was wide as the sky. They crunched off the soft grass on to the chalk of the road stretching north and south of them to Green Gates and the Priory. She found that they were to shake hands. “Well—so long!” said he. “So long!” said she. They went their ways. And that was the end, for Laura, of Justin’s first leave. But she felt better. If it had done her good to see him, it had done her all the good in the world, she thought, to laugh at him. What Justin thought, History does not say. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXXIV The spring and summer passed like one of those interminable nightmares whose horror is in the fact that it is ever about to be revealed, and never is revealed, to the dreamer. Mrs. Cloud and Laura opened their papers at breakfast, to read and shudder and murmur mechanically, “Their poor wives—God help them!” but the guilty sense of reprieve would be gone before the meal was ended. Fear was to be their portion rather than fact: and Mrs. Cloud, for one, broke under the burden. She spoke little, never of herself; but she grew visibly older, turning under Laura’s anxious eyes into a silent old woman, content to sit in the sun. But gradually Laura realized that she was aware of her own failing strength, that she husbanded it of set purpose, that her very quietude was deliberate. When it was necessary she had words and counsel. She never missed writing to her son—quiet, cheerful letters in a firm hand. And the answers she would read aloud to Laura. “A good boy, Laura—to write so often. Three nights without sleep again—but he writes!”