"Somehow I have got to live!" she said to herself suddenly, with a violent trembling. But how? For she bore two griefs. The grief for him, of which she never let a word pass her lips, was perhaps the strongest among the forces that were destroying her. She knew well that she had torn the heart that loved her--that she had set free a hundred dark and morbid forces in Helbeck's life. But it was because she had realised, by the insight of a moment, the madness of what they had done, the gulf to which they were rushing--because, at one and the same instant, there had been revealed to her the fatality under which she must still resist, and he must become gradually, inevitably, her persecutor, and her tyrant! Amid the emotion, the overwhelming impressions of his story of himself, that conviction had risen in her inmost being--a strange inexorable voice of judgment--bidding her go! In a flash, she had seen the wretched future years--the daily struggle--the aspect of violence, even of horror, that his pursuit of her, his pressure upon her will, might assume--the sharpening of all those wild forces in her own nature. She was broken with the anguish of separation--and how she had been able to do what she had done, she did not know. But the inner voice persisted--that for the first time, amid the selfish, or passionate, or joy-seeking impulses of her youth, she had obeyed a higher law. The moral realities of the whole case closed her in. She saw no way out--no way in which, so far as her last act was concerned, she could have bettered or changed the deed. She had done it for him, first of all. He must be delivered from her. And she must have room to breathe, without making of her struggle for liberty a hideous struggle with him, and with love. Well, but--comfort!--where was it to be had? The girl's sensuous craving nature fought like a tortured thing in the grasp laid upon it. How was it possible to go on suffering like this? She turned impatiently to one thought after another. Beauty? Nature? Last year, yes! But now! That past physical ecstasy--in spring--in flowing water--in flowers--in light and colour--where was it gone? Let these tears--these helpless tears--make answer! Music?--books?--the books that "make incomparable old maids"--friends? The thought of the Friedlands made her realise that she could still love. But after all--how little!--against how much! Religion? All religion need not be as Alan Helbeck's. There was religion as the Friedlands understood it--a faith convinced of God, and of a meaning for human life, trusting the "larger hope" that springs out of the daily struggle of conscience, and the garnered experience of feeling. Both in Friedland and his wife, there breathed a true spiritual dignity and peace.