She fell into a restless sleep troublous with dreams. Personalities, scenes, chased each other through her wearied brain, which could not distinguish the false from the true, but which was conscious of an unvarying background of distress. Towards morning she woke and set her door open, for she was feverish with tossing and greedy of air. As she stood a moment on the landing, a subdued noise in her aunt’s room made her go quickly towards it and stand listening at the door. It was the terrible sound of Lady Eliza sobbing in the dawn. CHAPTER XVII CECILIA PAYS HER DEBTS CECILIA rose to meet a new day, each moment of which the coming years failed to obliterate from her memory. In the first light hours she had taken her happiness in her two hands and killed it, deliberately, for the sake of the woman she loved. She had decided to part with Gilbert Speid. She hid nothing from herself and made no concealment. She did not pretend that she could offer herself up willingly, or with any glow of the emotional flame of renunciation, for she had not that temperament which can make the sacrificial altar a bed of inverted luxury. She neither fell on her knees, nor prayed, nor called upon Heaven to witness her deed, because there was only one thing which she cared it should witness, and that was Lady Eliza’s peace of mind. Nor, while purchasing this, did she omit to count the cost. The price was a higher one than she could afford, for, when it was paid, there would be nothing left. The thing which had culminated but yesterday had been growing for many months, and only those who wait for an official stamp to be put upon events before admitting their existence will suppose that Cecilia was parting with what she had scarcely had time to find necessary. She was parting with everything, and she knew it. The piteousness of her aunt’s unquestionably real suffering was such that she determined it must end. That someone should suffer was inevitable, and the great gallantry in her rose up and told her that she could bear more than could Lady Eliza.