"Your people are home, they have just come back from abroad and had a very tiresome journey over because of the mobilization on the Continent. Janet wrote, or rather your uncle wrote for her, asking me to be here to meet them. Janet is very ill, she will never be able to walk or stand up again in her life. They have tried all sorts of things for her abroad, now it has come to the last. All day, and most of the night, for she sleeps very badly, she lies flat on her back, and all the time her eyes seem to be watching for something. She speaks very little, everything seems to be shut away in her heart, but yesterday--after having first talked the matter over with your uncle--I went up to her room and asked her point blank: 'Janet, aren't you eating out your heart for Joan?' and she nodded stiffly, the tears in her eyes. So I sat right down and told her all about you: about your accident, about the hard (child, I know it has been hard) fight you have had, and at the end I said: 'Shall I send for her, Janet?' This time when she nodded the tears were streaming down her face. So I am sending for you. Don't let pride or anger stand between you, enough anguish has been caused already on both sides, and she is practically dying. Come, child, show a charity which your struggle will have taught you, and help to make her going a little easier, for she has always loved you, and her heart breaks for the need of you." It was a very sentimental letter for Miss Abercrombie to have written. And Aunt Janet was dying; quite long ago Joan had forgiven the hardness from her, there was no bitterness in her heart now, only a great sense of pity. She would go, of course she would go. Like a flash it came to her that she might just slip away and leave no address, no message to Dick. But even with the thought came the knowledge that she would only be shelving the difficulty for a little; he would wait, he would search till he found her. She did not think he would be very easy to put off. With Miss Abercrombie's letter open on her lap, she sat and watched the people passing by her. She was thinking of all her life since she had first come to London; Gilbert, their time together--strange how that memory had no more power to hurt--the black days that had followed, Rose and Fanny. Of them all perhaps she had loved Fanny the best; Fanny's philosophy of life was so delightfully simple, she was like some little animal that followed every fresh impulse. And she never seemed to regret or pay for her misdeeds. Apparently when you sinned calmly in the full knowledge that it was sin, you paid no penalty; it was only when you sinned attempting to make new laws for yourself and calling it no sin that the burden of retribution was so heavy to bear.