from mere ordinary poverty, from a life such as the vast majority of men and women are living on this earth?  She did not really shrink in her will.  It was only a mechanical movement of thought from one point to another.  Was it much punishment for what she had done to be very poor?  Would it not be better to be unclassed—­to live among people who help each other much because they have little to give?  Would it not be the way to do what Father Mark had said she should try to do—­those good things she had done before?  She could nurse, she could watch, she was able to do with little sleep.  She would be very humble with the sick and suffering now.  And it would not surely be wrong to go and find such a life far away from where she had sinned?  She began to wonder if she need stay and live through all the complications of the coming days.  Must it be the right thing to stay because it was the most unbearable?  She thought not.  There are times when recklessness is the only safety.  If she did not burn her ships now she could not tell what temptations might come.  But she would not let it be among her motives that thus she would thereby escape unbearable pity from Lady Rose and the far sterner magnanimity of Edmund Grosse.  She would act simply; she would ask Rose a favour; she would ask her to provide for Miss Carew.

Half consciously again her hands went to her throat.  She unclasped the pearl necklace that Edmund had seen on Madame Danterre’s withered neck in the garden at Florence.  She slipped off four large rings, and then gathered up a few jewels that lay about.  “One ought not to leave valuables about,” she thought, and she did not know that she added “after a death.”

If Miss Carew had been in the room she would probably not have understood that anything special was going on.  Molly moved quietly about, collecting together on a little table by the cupboard, rings, brooches, buckles, watches—­anything of much value.  She sought and found the key of the little safe in the wardrobe and put away these objects with the large jewel cases already inside it.  She also put with them her cheque book and her banker’s book.  A very small cheque book on a different bank where the interest of the L2000 had not been drawn on for six months, she put down on her writing table.  Then she looked round the room.  Was there nothing there really her own, and that she cared to keep either for its own sake or because it had belonged to someone she had loved?  An awful sense of loneliness swept over her as she looked round and could think of nothing.  Each beautiful thing on walls or tables that she looked at seemed repulsive in its turn, for it had either belonged to Madame Danterre or been bought with her money.  There was not so much as a letter which she cared ever to see again.  She had burnt Edmund’s few notes when she first came to Westmoreland House.

She had once met a woman who had lost everything in a fire.  “I have everything new,” she wailed, “nothing that I ever had before—­not a photograph, not a prayer-book, nor an old letter.  I don’t feel that I am the same person.”  The words came back now.  “Not the same person,” and suddenly a sense of relief began to dawn upon her.