"Will you tell her," said Brodrick, "or shall I?" "I'll tell her. I'll tell her now. But you must back me up." Brodrick fetched Jane. He had found her as Gertrude had said. She was heavy-eyed, and dazed with the embraces of her dream. But when she saw the look that passed between Hugh and Henry her face was one white fear. The two were about to arraign her. She took the chair that Henry held for her. Then he told her. And Brodrick backed him up with silence and a face averted. It was not until Henry had left them together that he spoke to her. "Don't take it so hardly, Jinny," he said. "It's not as if you knew." "I might have known," she answered. She was thinking, "George told me that I should have to pay--that there'd be no end to my paying." LIII The Brodricks--Hugh--Henry--all of them--stood justified. There was, indeed, rather more justice than mercy in their attitude. She could not say that they had let her off easily. She knew (and they had taken care that she should know) the full extent of her misdoing. That was it. They regarded her genius (the thing which had been tacked on to her) more as a crime than a misfortune. It was a power in the highest degree destructive and malign, a power utterly disintegrating to its possessor, and yet a power entirely within her own control. They refused to recognize in it any divine element of destiny, while they remained imperturbably unastonished at its course. They judged it as they would have judged any reprehensible tendency to excitement or excess. You gave way to it or you did not give way. In Jane the thing was monstrous. She had sinned through it the unforgivable sin, the sin against the family, the race. And she had been warned often enough. They had always told her that she would have to pay for it. But now that the event had proved them so deplorably right, now that they were established as guardians of the obvious, and masters of the expected, they said no more. They assumed no airs of successful prophecy. They were sorry for her. They gathered about her when the day of reckoning came; they couldn't bear to see her paying, to think that she should have to pay. She knew that as long as she paid they would stand by her. More than ever the family closed in round her; it stood solid, a sheltering and protecting wall. She was almost unaware how close they were to her. It seemed to her that she stood alone there, in the centre of the circle, with her sin. Her sin was always there, never out of her sight, in the little half-living body of the child. Her sin tore at her heart as she nursed, night and day, the little strange, dark thing, stamped with her stamp. She traced her sin in its shrunken face, its thread-like limbs, its sick nerves and bloodless veins.