An hour later he was alone for a moment with Nina. She had come in with her hat and jacket on. "Do you mind," she said, "if I go out? I've _got_ to go." There was nothing to be said. He knew the nature of her necessity, and she knew that he knew. She stood confronting him and his knowledge with a face that never flinched. His eyes protested, with that eternal tenderness of his that had been her undoing. She steadied her voice under it. "I want you to know, Owen, that I sent for you." "It was like your goodness." She shrugged her thin shoulders. "There was nothing else," she said, "that I could do." That night, while Prothero and Laura sat together holding each other's hands, Nina walked up and down outside on the Embankment, in the rain. She had said that she was more like a man than a woman; and with her stride that gave her garments recklessly to the rain, with her impetuous poise, and hooded, hungry eyes, she had the look of some lean and vehement adolescent, driven there by his youth. The next day, very early, she went down into Wales, a virgin to her mountains. She had done all she could. XL Laura was staying at the Brodricks. She was to stay, Jane insisted on it, until she was married. She would have to stay for ever then, Laura said. Her marriage seemed so far-off, so unlikely, so impossible. For Prothero had offended the powers that governed his material destiny, the editors and proprietors of the "Morning Telegraph." A man who, without a moment's notice, could fling up his appointment, an appointment, mind you, that he had obtained, not by any merit of his own, but through the grace and favour of an editor's wife, an appointment that he held precariously, almost on sufferance, by mercy extended to him day by day and hour by hour, what could he hope for from sane, responsible men like Brodrick and Levine? Did he imagine that appointments hung on lamp-posts ready to his hand? Or that they only waited for his appearance, to fall instantly upon his head? And that, if they did fall on his head, he could take them on and off like his hat? And did he think that he could play the fool with a paper like the "Morning Telegraph"? These questions Brodrick asked of Levine and Levine of Brodrick, before the unspeakably shocked, the unconditionally assenting faces of John and Henry.