There will always be a scar—but a very small one—on my arm. That will be the only reminder. Good-bye, dear Jim, and God bless and keep you, always, in the right.” She read over the letter, slowly, dispassionately, and fought back the temptation to write further, to fling more of her true feeling into it. That, at best, would be only a cruel kindness. As she folded and sealed the letter she felt that she was sealing down many years of her past youth. She already felt that she had passed over some mysterious Great Divide, that some vast morainic loop already walled her back from her former existence. And then, as a sudden, rushing sense of her isolation swept over her, she broke down, in that very hour of her ironic triumph, and wept miserably, passionately, hopelessly. Her misery clung to her all that day, until, late in the afternoon, she caught the first glimpse of Oxford from her compartment window. At one touch it carried her back to the six long years of her girlhood, for she had been little more than a child when first taken from the dubious care of her father—and the happiest stretch of her life had been lived within sound of Oxford’s tranquil bells. It had been her first plan, when she left the train, to take a carriage and drive leisurely through the old university town. It would be her one hour of freedom, before crossing that final Rubicon; it was only, she protested, a human enough hesitation before the ultimate plunge. Vividly and minutely she remembered the town, as she had seen it from the familiar hills, wrapt in sunlight and purplish shadows by day, lying cool and dark and tranquil under the summer moon by night, steeped in the silences and the soft mistiness of the river valley, with here and there a bell tinkling and a roof glimmering through the gloom. She even used to say she found a strange comfort in the number of these bells and in the thought of their wakefulness throughout the night. But now, through some underground circuit of memory, they carried her thoughts back to the clanging brilliance of Broadway at midnight, to the movement and tumult and press of light-hearted humanity. And by contrast, they now seemed to her to toll lugubriously. The quiet city about her seemed tainted with antiquity, autumnal, overshadowed by the grayness of death. It almost stifled her. She had forlornly hoped that the calm beauty of that town of bells and towers would still fall as a welcome balm on her torn feelings. But she had changed—oh, how she had changed! It was not, she told herself, the mere fruit of physical exhaustion. Her one desire on that day, indeed, was to reach that condition of bodily weariness which would render her indifferent to all mental blows. It was only her past, whimpering for its own.