The message had been sent an hour after we left home. It reached Lowndes Square seven hours before I had come beating at the door. That it had lain in the hall forgotten seemed to me hardly to matter now. Not even to-day could I go home. I seemed to see the future. If my mother had not died in the night, the end would very quickly come. There was mercy there. As for me--I knew I should not die till I was sure that Betty was out of the world. As though to our best, our only friend, I turned to the thought of her physical weakness. But I must be sure. I rose up out of my bed ... and Darkness took me in her arms. * * * * * I was ill a long, long while. Whenever a time came that found me free of fever, able to think again, what could I think except that, even if Betty were dead--there were the others. The unhappy man had said that always, always there were others. So I had seen "the need" wrong. The lamp of a young girl's hope, held up in her little world, to help her to find a mate--that light was pale beside the red glare of this fierce demand from men. And the people who knew least went on saying it wasn't true. And the people who knew most said: there are many thousand "lost sisters" in London. Who would help me to find mine?--or to sleep once more, knowing Bettina safely dead! Nothing to hope from the foggy, self-bemused mystic, whose face alternated with that of the nurse in and out of my dreaming and my waking. Long ago she had turned away from service, even from knowledge. There was "no evil, except as a figment of mortal mind." Peace! peace!--and this battle nightly at her gate! Just once her doors burst open, and she was made aware. The sound would soon be faint in her ears, and then would cease. Who else? Not her friend, the Healer--whose way of healing was to look away from the wound. Could I trust even Eric to help? The man who had set his work before his love--who had said: "If all the people in the house were dying, if the house were falling about my ears and I thought I was 'getting it'--I'd let the house fall and the folks die and go on tracking the Secret home." Even if that were not quite seriously meant, no more than all the other good men and true, would that one leave the lesser task and set himself to cure this cancer at the heart of the world. Eric, and all the rest (this it was that crushed hope out of my heart)--_they all knew_. And they accepted this thing. That was the thought that again and again tore me out of my bed, and brought the great Darkness down. * * * * * In the grey intervals I was conscious of Mrs. Harborough's being more and more in the room. I came to look for her. She spoke sometimes of my father. She imagined I was like him. To think that made her very gentle and, I believe, brought her a kind of light.