Only her dog kept her company. Sometimes she rose out of restlessness, and moved about the room, and the dog's eyes would follow her, dumbly dependent. The room was dimly lit; in the mirrors she saw now and then the ghostly passage of some one who seemed herself and not herself. The windows were open to a misty garden, waiting for moonrise; in the house all was silence; only from the distant road and village came voices sometimes of children, or the sounds of a barrel-organ, fragmentary and shrill. Loneliness ached in her heart--spoke to her from the future. And five miles away Oliver, too, was lonely--and in pain. _Pain_!--the thought of it, as of something embodied and devilish, clutching and tearing at a man already crushed and helpless--gave her no respite. The tears ran down her cheeks as she moved to and fro, her hands at her breast. Yet she was helpless. What could she do? Even if he were free from Alicia, even if he wished to recall her, how could he--maimed and broken--take the steps that could alone bring her to his side? If their engagement had subsisted, horror, catastrophe, the approach of death itself, could have done nothing to part them. Now, how was a man in such a plight to ask from a woman what yet the woman would pay a universe to give? And in the face of the man's silence, how could the woman speak? No!--she began to see her life as the Vicar saw it: pledged to large causes, given to drudgeries--necessary, perhaps noble, for which the happy are not meant. This quiet shelter of Beechcote could not be hers much longer. If she was not to go to Oliver, impossible that she could live on in this rose-scented stillness of the old house and garden, surrounded by comfort, tranquillity, beauty, while the agony of the world rang in her ears--wild voices!--speaking universal, terrible, representative things, yet in tones piteously dear and familiar, close, close to her heart. No; like Marion Vincent, she must take her life in her hands, offering it day by day to this hungry human need, not stopping to think, accepting the first task to her hand, doing it as she best could. Only so could she still her own misery; tame, silence her own grief; grief first and above all for Oliver, grief for her own youth, grief for her parents. She must turn to the poor in that mood she had in the first instance refused to allow the growth of in herself--the mood of one seeking an opiate, an anæsthetic. The scrubbing of hospital floors; the pacing of dreary streets on mechanical errands; the humblest obedience and routine; things that must be done, and in the doing of them deaden thought--these were what she turned to as the only means by which life could be lived.