"I'm sure that's what I did wrong at home. Showed them that I cared for them too much. The boys were very good, but they were boys, you know, and took everything for granted as men do." She said this with a very old world-wise air. "They were dear boys--they were and are. But it was better before they went to school, when they needed me always. Afterwards when they had been to school they despised girls and thought it silly to let girls do things for them. And then they didn't like being at home--because father drank." She dropped her voice here and came very close to him. "Do you know what it is to hate and love the same person? I was like that with father. When he had drunk too much and broke all the things--when we had so few anyway--and hit the boys, and did things--oh, dreadful things that men do when they're drunk, then I hated him. I didn't love him. I didn't want to help him--I just wanted to get away. And before--before he drank so much he was so good and so sweet and so clever. Do you know that my father was one of the cleverest doctors in the whole of England? He was. If he hadn't drunk he might have been anywhere and done anything. But sometimes when he _was_ drunk and the boys were away at school, and the house was in such a mess, and the servant wouldn't stay because of father, I felt I couldn't go on--I _couldn't!_--and that I'd run down the road leaving everything as it was, into the town and hide so that they'd never find me. . . . And now," she suddenly broke out, "I have run away--and see what I've made of it!" "It isn't over yet," he said to her quietly. "Life's just beginning for you." "Well, anyway," she answered, with a sudden resolute calm that made her seem ever so much older and more mature, "I've helped the boys to start in life, and I won't have to go back to all that again--that's something. It's fine to love some one and work for them as you said just now, but if it's always dirty, and there's never enough money, and the servants are always in a bad temper, and you never have enough clothes, and all the people in the village laugh at you because your father drinks, then you want to stop loving for a little while and to escape anywhere, anywhere to anybody where it isn't dirty. Love isn't enough--no, it isn't--if you're so tired with work that you haven't any energy to think whether you love or not." She hesitated there, looking away from him, and said so softly that he with difficulty caught her words: "I will tell you one thing that you won't believe, but it's true. I wanted to go to Crispin." He turned to look at her in amazement. "You _wanted_ to go?" "Yes. I know you thought that I went for the boys and father. I know that David thinks that too. Of course that was true a little. He promised me that they should have everything. It was a relief to me that I needn't think of them any more. But it wasn't only that. I wanted to go. I wanted to be free."