"But you didn't knock him down for that?" "No; it was when he took Theresa's picture, and threw it on the fire, and said bad things about her. I saved it first, and then he went. I know he didn't mean it, I know he'd never think it--he's not that kind of beast--but he said it. And he was on the floor before I knew it, white, and with blood trickling. And I think my mother hated me that minute." "She'll be wondering where you are." "No; she'll be thinking of nothing in the world but him. She might have cared for half a dozen of us, but one seems to have been worse than useless!" "That's because you gave help, instead of asking it." He bent his lips into a wry smile. "But I feel I've been cheated, all the same. And I'm a nasty, evil-tempered brute, but I've had the grace to thank God for delivering Theresa from my hands." "And the day may come when she reproaches Him for it. Is the lass blind or daft?" "Now, Janet!" "It's time you went to bed." "I'm going. I think I'll have to tell old Webb he mustn't come here. I was going to stay with him this Easter, but--well, I've changed my mind! I'll have to let him know I can't leave home, and tell him not to come here. I hardly think it's safe for him. Heaven knows what he'll do next. Good-night." "Good-night, Alec." "I don't know what I'd do without you," he said awkwardly. She waited until she could hear his footsteps no longer, and then she put out the light. In a little while the window-pane emerged from the darkness, square and grey, and on it the austere larches were chiselled blackly. She rocked herself in her seat. She saw Alexander's face, lined by a fierce craving and repression, and pitifully overlaid with patience. He seemed to have looked bitter disappointment in the eyes, and made a comrade of it. His own eyes were dulled that had been so bright. She saw the painful twitching of his cheeks, and how his hands, which he had thought were hidden, clenched themselves in his pockets. She felt a masterful indignation against Theresa, who could love another than this man, and a yearning over Alexander like a mother's over a hungry child whom she is powerless to help. But Janet was not powerless. She sat immobile, and she had first a strange ecstasy of physical lightness, as though her mind had soared easily beyond her body, and was rejoicing in the freedom, and looked distantly on the numb husk it had left, and then, with a leap, it was back in its place again, grinding at all the memories it had stored, bringing them from the corners where she had covered them in the dark, forcing them into the light. And she saw them. They were put into her hands, and she turned them over and over, knowing them again, and the power she had resisted in her clean youth swooped on her like an evil, moulting bird, and under its spread and meagre wings she sat, rocking now in pitilessness, in place of pity, dead to everything but the one thing she meant to do.