All that day, while Maurice was hurrying back to Mercer, Eleanor lay very still, and when Mrs. Newbolt or Mrs. Houghton came into the room she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. Edith did not come into the room; so, in a hazy way, Eleanor took it for granted that she had left the house. "I should think she would!" Eleanor thought; "she could hardly have the face to stay in the same house with me." But she did not think much about Edith; she was absorbed in deciding what she should say to Maurice. Should she tell him the truth?--or some silly story of a walk to their meadow? The two alternatives flew back and forth in her mind like shuttlecocks. There was one thing she felt sure of: that letter--which Mrs. Houghton had brought from her desk, which Maurice was to have read when she had done what she set out to do, but which now she kept clutched in her hand, or hidden under her pillow--_Maurice must not see that letter!_ If he read it, now, while she was (she told herself) still half sick from those drenched hours of the trolley ride and the dark wanderings from Mrs. O'Brien's to Mrs. Newbolt's, the whole thing would seem simply ridiculous. Some time, he must know that she loved him enough to buy Jacky for him, by dying--or trying to die! She would tell him, _some time_; because her purpose (even if it had failed) would measure the heights and depths of her love as nothing else could; but he must not know it now, because she hadn't carried it out. That first night, when she had found herself safe and warm (oh, warm! She had thought she never would be warm any more!)--when she had found herself in Mrs. Newbolt's spare room in the four-poster with its chintz hangings and its great soft pillows, she had been glad she had not carried it out. Glad not to be dead. As she lay there, shivering slowly into delicious comfort, and fending off Mrs. Newbolt's distracted questions, she had had occasional moments of a sense of danger escaped; perhaps it _would_ have been wrong to--to lie down there in the river? People call it wicked Mrs. Newbolt, for a single suspicious instant ("She forgot it right off," Eleanor said; "she just thought we'd quarreled!"); but Mrs. Newbolt had said it was "wicked." "But I didn't do it!" Eleanor told herself in a rush of gratitude. She hadn't been "wicked"! Instead, she was in Mrs. Newbolt's spare room, looking dreamily at the old French clock on the mantelpiece, whose tarnished gilt face glimmered between two slender black-marble columns; sometimes she counted the tick-tock of the slowly swinging pendulum; sometimes, toward dawn, she watched the foggy yellow daylight peer between the red rep curtains; but counting, and looking, and drowsing, she was glad to be alive. It was not until the next afternoon that she began to be faintly mortified at being alive. It was then that she had felt that she _must_ get that letter--Maurice mustn't see it! Little by little, humiliation at her failure to be heroic, grew acute.