So that was Roy's friend! They had not gone down with the yacht that had lain under the hill at Rainham Parva. But she had only seen Mr. Izzard's back. For a moment, but only for a moment, she thought of Roy; then the sum-total of a long sequence of reveries returned to her again. Or rather, the factors that made that total returned. In spite of her broodings late at night, when her letters were written and Jimmy's food prepared for the night, she was still unable to cast them up. Had she been asked to state her relation now to Mr. Jeffries her attempt would have been something like this: "It's perfectly absurd, of course. There is no relation--nothing that can properly be called a relation. How can there be, with a man I don't see--haven't seen since that queer party? I don't even know where he is or what he's doing; he may be a commissionaire again for all I know." "Yes, but," she now answered herself, as if it had been some form of a dialogue, "don't forget that other night, at Mortlake Road, after Kitty'd gone." She did not forget that night. She had told herself that night that it was nonsense that she should love Mr. Jeffries. Again she answered that critical objector within herself. "But it _is_ nonsense after all! How _can_ I? I suppose I mean that if things had been different I might have loved him. Moping about a man you never see is all very well for a schoolgirl for a week or two, but not for grown women, and mothers at that." "Then you mean he's just the same to you as Buck and Chaff?" the dialogue continued, as she walked. "All I mean is that he might have been more." "Well, suppose you were to hear now that he'd broken off with Kitty, and--you know--that other were to happen?" She did know what she meant by "that other." It was the most familiar of her thoughts. It was what in her heart she was stilly waiting for--to learn one day that Mr. Jeffries had broken off with Kitty and had become engaged to Evie Soames. And at that point she always tried to stop the dialogue. Beyond that point lay something that she vaguely apprehended might be horrible. She had no definite reason for supposing this horrible thing to exist. The horror, indeed, was that it might exist, and to entertain morbid thoughts about something that merely might exist was neither pleasant nor wise. But at times she could not forget the promise she had once made to herself--that if anything unaccountable ever happened to a certain young man she would know in what quarter to look for the likely cause of it. And something had happened. Part of what had happened she had had from Miss Cora; "A lethal chamber--the nasty little sewer-rat!" Miss Cora had said; and it had happened on the eve of his wedding to Evie Soames. To commit suicide had been the only thing to do. And of course he had committed suicide....