“Alone to land upon that shore
     With not one thing that we have known before.”

Oh, the immensity of such a mercy!  That hymn had made her shiver as a child; how different it seemed now!  Molly knelt down by the couch, and her shoulders trembled as a tempest of feeling came over her.  Criminals hardened by long lives of fraud have been known to be happier after being found out—­simply because the strain was over.  They had destroyed their moral sense.  Molly’s conscience was alive, though torn, bleeding, and debased.  She could not be happy as they were, but yet there was the lifting of the weight as of a great mountain rolled away.  She was afraid of the immense sense of relief that now seemed coming upon her.  Could she really become free of the horrible Molly of the last months—­this noxious, vile, lying, thieving woman?  What an awful strain that woman had lived in!  She had told Mark that what frightened her was the thought that she would still be herself.  She longed now to cut away everything that had belonged to her.  Might she not by God’s grace, in poverty and hard work, with everything around her quite different from the past, might she not quite do to death the Molly who had lived in Westmoreland House?  The cry was more passionate than spiritual perhaps, but the longing had its power to help.  She rose and again moved quietly about the room of the dead, bad woman, which must be left in order for the new owners.  She put some things together—­what was necessary for a night or two—­and felt almost glad that she had a comb and brush she had not yet used.  There was a bag with cheap fittings Mrs. Carteret had given her as a girl, which would hold all she needed.  And then she remembered that she had something she would like to take away; it was a nurse’s apron, and in its pocket a nurse’s case of small instruments.  They were what she used when nursing with the district nurse in the village at home.  Then she sat down and wrote a cheque and a note, and proceeded to take them downstairs.  The cheque was for L30 out of the little Dexter cheque book, and the note was an abrupt little line to tell a friend that she could not dine out that night.  She “did not feel up to it” was the only excuse given, and a furious hostess declared that Miss Dexter had become perfectly insufferable.  She seemed to think that she could do exactly as she chose because she was absurdly rich.

The butler was able to give Molly L30 in notes and cash, and it was his opinion that she wanted the money for playing cards that night.  Molly crept upstairs again with a foreign Bradshaw in her hand.  She looked out the train for the night boat to Dieppe.  It left Charing Cross at 9.45.  She had chosen Dieppe for the first stage of her journey—­of which she knew not the further direction—­for two reasons.  The first was because she knew that she ought to stay within reach if it were necessary for her to do business with her own or Lady Rose’s