But his sister’s engagement, perhaps, had only made Farrell feel more sharply than ever the collapse of his own hopes.  Three days after Sarratt’s death Nelly had written to him to give him George’s dying message, and to thank him on her own account for all that he had done to help her journey.  The letter was phrased as Nelly could not help phrasing anything she wrote.  Cicely, to whom Nelly dumbly shewed it, thought it ‘sweet.’  But on Farrel’s morbid state, it struck like ice, and he had the greatest difficulty in writing a letter of sympathy, such as any common friend must send her, in return.  Every word seemed to him either too strong or too weak.  The poor Viking, indeed, had begun to look almost middle-aged, and Cicely with a pang had discovered or fancied some streaks of grey in the splendid red beard and curly hair.  At the same time her half-sarcastic sense perceived that he was far better provided than Nelly, with the means of self-protection against his trouble.  ‘Men always are,’ thought Cicely—­’they have so much more interesting things to do.’  And she compared the now famous hospital, with its constant scientific developments, the ever-changing and absorbing spectacle of the life within it, and Farrell’s remarkable position amid its strenuous world—­with poor Nelly’s ‘housemaiding.’

But Nelly was choosing the path that suited her own need, and in the spiritual world, the humblest means may be the best.  It was when she was cooking for her nuns that some of St. Teresa’s divinest ecstasies came upon her!  Not that there was any prospect of ecstasy for Nelly Sarratt.  She seemed to herself to be engaged in a kind of surgery—­the cutting or burning away of elements in herself that she had come to scorn.  Hester, who was something of a saint herself, came near to understanding her.  Cicely could only wonder.  But Hester perceived, with awe, a fierceness in Nelly—­a kind of cruelty—­towards herself, with which she knew well, from a long experience of human beings, that it was no use to argue.  The little, loving, easy-going thing had discovered in her own gentleness and weakness, the source of something despicable—­that is, of her own failure to love George as steadfastly and truly as he had loved her.  The whole memory of her marriage was poisoned for her by this bitter sense that in little more than a year after she had lost him, while he was actually still alive, and when the law even, let alone the highest standards of love, had not released her, she had begun to yield to the wooing of another man.  Perhaps only chance, under all the difficult circumstances of her intimacy with Farrell, had saved her from a shameful yielding—­from dishonour, as well as a broken faith.

’What had brought it about?’—­she asked herself.  And she asked it with a desperate will, determined to probe her own sin to the utmost.  ’Soft living!’—­was her own reply—­moral and physical indolence.  The pleasure of being petted and spoiled, the readiness to let others work for her, and think for her, what people called her ‘sweetness!’ She turned upon it with a burning hatred and contempt.  She would scourge it out of herself.  And then perhaps some day she would be able to think of George’s last faint words with something else than remorseful anguish—­_ love you, sweetheart!—­I love you, sweetheart!’_