For three days Edith’s struggle went on.  She had her strong hours and her weak ones.  There were moments when, exhausted and yet exalted, she determined to give him up altogether, to live the fiction of the marriage until her mother’s death, and then to give up the house and never see him again.  If she gave him up she must never see him again.  At those times she prayed not to love him any longer, and sometimes, for a little while after that, she would have peace.  It was almost as though she did not love him.

But there were the other times, when she lay there and pictured them married, and dreamed a dream of bringing him to her feet.  He had offered a marriage that was not a marriage, but he was a man, and human.  He did not want her now, but in the end he would want her; young as she was she knew already the strength of a woman’s physical hold on a man.

Late on the afternoon of the third day Ellen came again, a swollen-eyed Ellen, dressed in black with black cotton gloves, and a black veil around her hat.  Ellen wore her mourning with the dogged sense of duty of her class, and would as soon have gone to the burying ground in her kitchen apron as without black.  She stood in the doorway of the ward, hesitating, and Edith saw her and knew.

Her first thought was not of her mother at all.  She saw only that the God who had saved her had made her decision for her, and that now she would never marry Willy Cameron.  All this time He had let her dream and struggle.  She felt very bitter.

Ellen came and sat down beside her.

“She’s gone.  Edith,” she said; “we didn’t tell you before, but you have to know sometime.  We buried her this afternoon.”

Suddenly Edith forgot Willy Cameron, and God, and Dan, and the years ahead.  She was a little girl again, and her mother was saying: 

“Brush your teeth and say your prayers, Edie.  And tomorrow’s Saturday.  So you don’t need to get up until you’re good and ready.”

She lay there.  She saw her mother growing older and more frail, the house more untidy, and her mother’s bright spirit fading to the drab of her surroundings.  She saw herself, slipping in late at night, listening always for that uneasy querulous voice.  And then she saw those recent months, when her mother had bloomed with happiness; she saw her struggling with her beloved desserts, cheerfully unconscious of any failure in them; she saw her, living like a lady, as she had said, with every anxiety kept from her.  There had been times when her thin face had been almost illuminated with her new content and satisfaction.

Suddenly grief and remorse overwhelmed her.

“Mother!” she said, huskily.  And lay there, crying quietly, with Ellen holding her hand.  All that was hard and rebellious in Edith Boyd was swept away in that rush of grief, and in its place there came a new courage and resolution.  She would meet the future alone, meet it and overcome it.  But not alone, either; there was always—­