“I see....  Good-night, Mr. Francis.”

* * * * *

She would not let him come down the lift with her, so when he had seen the smooth box drop noiselessly below the level, he went back again to his model of the Abbey and the little dummy figures.  But, before he began to move these about again, he sat for a moment or two with pursed lips, staring.

CHAPTER IV

I

A week later Mabel awoke about dawn; and for a moment or two forgot where she was.  She even spoke Oliver’s name aloud, staring round the unfamiliar room, wondering what she did here.  Then she remembered, and was silent....

It was the eighth day she had spent in this Home; her probation was finished:  to-day she wits at liberty to do that for which she had come.  On the Saturday of the previous week she had gone through her private examination before the magistrate, stating under the usual conditions of secrecy her name, age and home, as well as her reasons for making the application for Euthanasia; and all had passed off well.  She had selected Manchester as being sufficiently remote and sufficiently large to secure her freedom from Oliver’s molestation; and her secret had been admirably kept.  There was not a hint that her husband knew anything of her intentions; for, after all, in these cases the police were bound to assist the fugitive.  Individualism was at least so far recognised as to secure to those weary of life the right of relinquishing it.  She scarcely knew why she had selected this method, except that any other seemed impossible.  The knife required skill and resolution; firearms were unthinkable, and poison, under the new stringent regulations, was hard to obtain.  Besides, she seriously wished to test her own intentions, and to be quite sure that there was no other way than this....

Well, she was as certain as ever.  The thought had first come to her in the mad misery of the outbreak of violence on the last day of the old year.  Then it had gone again, soothed away by the arguments that man was still liable to relapse.  Then once more it had recurred, a cold and convincing phantom, in the plain daylight revealed by Felsenburgh’s Declaration.  It had taken up its abode with her then, yet she controlled it, hoping against hope that the Declaration would not be carried into action, occasionally revolting against its horror.  Yet it had never been far away; and finally when the policy sprouted into deliberate law, she had yielded herself resolutely to its suggestion.  That was eight days ago; and she had not had one moment of faltering since that.

Yet she had ceased to condemn.  The logic had silenced her.  All that she knew was that she could not bear it; that she had misconceived the New Faith; that for her, whatever it was for others, there was no hope....  She had not even a child of her own.