Her mind had a curious sensation of lop-sidedness; it was partly numbed, partly acute; she was incapable of remembering to shift her glance, but quite clearly she saw words which told her the letter was written to that woman in the hills. There was no doubt of that. Was he not comparing her face to a sun-bathed peak visible through cloud? She learnt this in half a minute's passing, and then she rose. She was cold, but her mind was once more a whole, and merciless in its conclusions and its indictment. "Are you going, my dear?" He moved his papers into a little heap. "Yes." He did not look at her. "I wish," he said, beating a tattoo on the desk and speaking with an effort--"I wish you would always come to me, Theresa, when you are--when you are not happy." "Oh!" she cried chokingly, and rushed away. He found her confusion easy to understand, and he loved her for the reserves so seldom and so delightfully broken. The icy darkness of her bedroom enclosed Theresa with the chill and colour of life itself. The future was cold and rayless; she groped towards it and was afraid, but she had the courage of anger and as she stumbled against the bedpost, she lifted her head. How could he? how could he? She saw her mother sitting down there by the fire, rocking gently, with that faint smile curving her lips; she remembered the shadow that had sometimes seemed to fall between her parents, and loyalty ran out towards her mother like a wave. And, on the other side of the landing, bending over his desk, that meek, uncertain father of hers wrote his love letters in secret. He wrote love letters because he could not afford to go to the mountains and the woman, because he would not leave his wife! The terrible, sickly blackness of things covered her. She struggled under it, and with the effect of something magical, mockingly plain, yet distant, she saw, all the time, the lights of the docks, and heard the clanging of the tramcar bells in New Dock Road. Lights while she floundered in gloom, human sounds while she wandered in fear-inhabited caverns! She had rejoiced in the reading of such situations, she had fancied herself fitted to cope with them, but she found reality too real. Anger at something greater than a small personal injury was a bigger passion than she had imagined, and pity, doomed to voicelessness and impotence, tore her with strong hands.