“The Good-bye Gate!” she repeated to herself.  That was what they had come to now, she and Jack.  Not a little wicket through which one might push his way back some day, but a great barred thing that was clanging behind them irrevocably, shutting them away for ever from the fair road along which they had travelled so happily.  Shutting out even the slightest view of those far-off “Delectable Mountains,” towards which they had been journeying.  In the face of Jack’s misfortune and all that he was giving up, her part of the sacrifice sank into comparative insignificance.  Her suffering for him was so great that it dulled the sharpness of her own renunciations, and even dulled her disappointment for Joyce.  The year in Paris had meant as much to her as the course at Warwick Hall had meant to Mary.

All through the trip she sat going round and round the same circle of thoughts, ending always with the hopeless cry, “Oh, why did it have to be?  It isn’t right that he should have to suffer so!” Once when the train stopped for some time to take water and wait on a switch for the passing of a fast express, she opened her suit-case and took out her journal and fountain-pen.  Going on with the record from the place where she had dropped it the day before when Jack’s letter interrupted it, she chronicled the receipt of the check, the shopping expedition that followed, and the gay outing afterward in the touring-car.  Then down below she wrote: 

“But now I have come to the Good-bye Gate.  Good-bye to all my good times.  So good-bye, even to you, little book, since you were to mark only the hours that shine.  Here at the bottom of the page I must write the words, ‘The End.’”

When they reached Warwick Hall she was too tired to begin any preparations that night for the longer journey, and still so dazed with the thought of Jack’s calamity to be keenly alive to the fact that this was the last night she would ever spend in the beloved room.  She was thankful to have it to herself for these last few hours, and thankful when Betty and Madam Chartley finally went out and left her alone.  She was worn out trying to keep up before people and to be brave as they bade her.  It was a relief to put out the light and, lying there alone in the dark, cry and cry till at last she sobbed herself to sleep.

Not till the next morning did she begin to feel the wrench of leaving, when the fresh fragrance of wet lilacs awakened her, blowing up from the old garden where all the sweetness of early April was astir.  Then she remembered that she would be far, far away when the June roses bloomed at Commencement, and that this was the last time she would ever be wakened by the blossoms and bird-calls of the dear old garden.

She sat up and looked around the room from one familiar object to another, oppressed and miserable at the thought that she would never see them again.  Then her glance rested on Lloyd’s picture, and for once the make-believe companionship of Lloyd’s shadow-self brought a comfort as deep as if her real self had spoken.  She held out her arms to it, whispering brokenly: