This mood of wilful depression, bordering upon melancholia, can be perhaps the most trying test to friendship that exists. To throw life into the balance of chance--to fling it absolutely away in a moment of heroism for a friend one loves, is a simple task compared with the unwearying patience that is needed to face the lightless gloom of another's misery. It taints all life, discolours all pleasures, tracks one--dogs one, like a shadow on the wall. Yet Janet passed the test with love the greater, even at the end of the gauntlet of those three weeks. "I'll be with you all day, the day after to-morrow," she said, as she departed; "and think about teaching the kiddies--I would if I were you. You'd get awfully fond of them--as if they were your own. Sons of gentlemen! Think of them! Dear little chaps! My God--the mothers bore them, though." CHAPTER III It should not be lightly touched upon, this heroism of Janet Hallard's in sacrificing three weeks of her work--every hour of which meant some living to her--in order to save Sally from that ultimate dark world of dementia towards which she was inevitably drifting. It was not the sacrifice of time alone, not the fact that on her return she was compelled to sell some of her valued possessions in order to meet the rent of her studio which the work she had left undone would have amply supplied. Much rather was it the noble perseverance of effort through the dim, impenetrable gloom of Sally's wide-eyed misery, her own spirits never cast down by the seeming impossibility of the task, her resources never exhausted by the persistent drain that was made upon them. Here was the strength of her masculinity united with the patient endurance of the woman in her heart. No man, of his own nature alone, could have won through the sweating labour of those three weeks--few women either. But that very combination of sex, that very duality of her nature which, as a woman, made her unlovable to any man, and endeared her so closely to Sally's life, had succeeded where a thousand others of her sex would have failed. She left Sally, it is true, a woman with a wounded heart to nurse, an aching misery to bear; but she left her with a sanity of purpose which can take up the tangled threads and, however blinded be the eyes with weeping, with fingers feeling their way, can unravel the knotted mass that lies before her. So she slowly returned to the common factors of existence, and in six weeks from the time of Traill's departure, was ready to smile at any moment to the humour of Janet's dry criticisms of life. But to move from her rooms, to disassociate herself from the past with every sorrow and every joy that it contained, was more than she could bring herself to do. Through all Janet's persuasions, Sally remained obdurate.