One thing remained to her. Nothing could take away from her the two years which had gone before. She had not yet destroyed, she did not feel that she need be called upon to destroy--until Lingard married some other woman--the letters he had written to her in those two years. She told herself that they had not been love letters, although to her simple heart they had seemed strangely like it. Any day during the past two years she might have opened a paper containing the news of Lingard's death. But if that of which she had had so sick a dread had happened, she would have had something dear, something intimately secret and sacred, to bear about with her, locked in the inner shrine of her heart, for the rest of her life. The present and the immediate future must be considered, and, as she had now told Athena of her decision, they must be considered to-day. She remembered the many broken engagements of which she had heard--Jane wondered if those other women had suffered as she was suffering now. The one thing she felt she could not do would be to go back to that little house in London, which to her would ever be filled with Hew Lingard--not Lingard as he was now, gloomy, preoccupied, avoiding her presence and yet painfully eager to obey her slightest wish--but Lingard the happy, the masterful lover who yet had been so tender, so patient with her. What did other people do when they broke off an engagement or--or were jilted? Jane tried to remember what she had heard such people did. One girl had been sent on a voyage round the world--another had refused to leave home, she had stayed and "faced it out." Fortunately she was not compelled to consider either of these alternatives. She was mistress of her own life, and she had already learnt the hard lesson that to deaden pain--heart pain--there is nothing like incessant, unending work. She made up her mind to go to another part of London, and start once more the salvage work which lay on the edge of the great sea strewn with human wreckage. But before Jane could do this, she must put an end to what had become, certainly to herself, and probably to Lingard also, an intolerable mockery. * * * * * Jane found Mabel Digby in bed; and the girl, though but little given to caresses, drew her down and laid her head on the other's kind breast. "Yes, it's true," she said, "I'm ill, and I don't know what's the matter with me"--she lifted her face and pushed her hair back from her forehead with a tired gesture. "No, I won't lie. I don't see why I should pretend--with you! I'm ill, Jane, because Bayworth Kaye is dead. I lie here thinking--thinking only of Bayworth. It's all so horrible--I mean that he should have died when he was so unhappy. I burnt all his letters the day he went away. You can't think how sorry I am now that I did that, Jane. There was nothing in them, they weren't love letters--at least I don't think so----" Jane gave a muffled cry of pain.