Through these days Cally hadn't seemed to care that Jack Dalhousie had killed himself, hadn't cared if the constrained tone of Mattie Allen's "steamer-letter"--which said that Mattie was terribly sorry, dear, but was vague as to what--indicated that the Heth glories had undergone a great and permanent eclipse. All her consciousness seemed sucked into the great ragged hole in her life left by Canning's going. Not till now, it seemed, had she realized to what measure her prince of lovers had twined himself into the reaches of her being. To pluck him, at a word, from her heart would have been a difficult task at best, and it was made the more difficult for her in that she did not, at first, put her will into it. For there had lingered in her a sort of stunned incredulity: she could not quite believe that their quarrel had been irretrievable, that Hugo was gone forever. In the four days' waiting and hiding in New York, even after she had put the ocean definitely between them, she multiplied her woes by keeping the small door of hope constantly open against her lover's possible return. And oh, how wretched she was through these days, how sorry, sorry for herself! And mamma was enormously sorry for herself; and there they were, the worst companions for each other that could possibly have been found in the world. So they had sat down in London, in a modest family-hotel well off the track of tourists and of fashion; for none knew better than mamma when to draw the purse-strings tight, and the European tour, planned as a triumphal progress, had been abased to a refuge and rustication. The average women in such a situation would, of course, quickly have pooled their sorrows for mutual comfort; but these two were fixedly held apart by their fundamental lack of sympathy with each other, and further by the disciplinary character of mamma's attitude. Whatever she wrote in her letters, Mrs. Heth's personal note was that Carlisle had wilfully brought shame and disgrace upon her ever indulgent parents, and she did not desire that the girl should be diverted for a moment from the contemplation of her errors. In their quiet quarters, they saw practically no one, did nothing but make themselves and each other as miserable as they could. They fairly wallowed in their respective seas of self-pity. And days passed when they hardly exchanged a word.