She had not told him of the Phillips episode.  But she felt instinctively that he knew.  It was always a little mysterious to her, his perception in matters pertaining to herself.

“I want your love,” she said to him one day.  “It helps me.  I used to think it was selfish of me to take it, knowing I could never return it—­not that love.  But I no longer feel that now.  Your love seems to me a fountain from which I can drink without hurting you.”

“I should love to be with you always,” he answered, “if you wished it.  You won’t forget your promise?”

She remembered it then.  “No,” she answered with a smile.  “I shall keep watch.  Perhaps I shall be worthy of it by that time.”

She had lost her faith in journalism as a drum for the rousing of the people against wrong.  Its beat had led too often to the trickster’s booth, to the cheap-jack’s rostrum.  It had lost its rallying power.  The popular Press had made the newspaper a byword for falsehood.  Even its supporters, while reading it because it pandered to their passions, tickled their vices, and flattered their ignorance, despised and disbelieved it.  Here and there, an honest journal advocated a reform, pleaded for the sweeping away of an injustice.  The public shrugged its shoulders.  Another newspaper stunt!  A bid for popularity, for notoriety:  with its consequent financial kudos.

She still continued to write for Greyson, but felt she was labouring for the doomed.  Lord Sutcliffe had died suddenly and his holding in the Evening Gazette had passed to his nephew, a gentleman more interested in big game shooting than in politics.  Greyson’s support of Phillips had brought him within the net of Carleton’s operations, and negotiations for purchase had already been commenced.  She knew that, sooner or later, Greyson would be offered the alternative of either changing his opinions or of going.  And she knew that he would go.  Her work for Mrs. Denton was less likely to be interfered with.  It appealed only to the few, and aimed at informing and explaining rather than directly converting.  Useful enough work in its way, no doubt; but to put heart into it seemed to require longer views than is given to the eyes of youth.

Besides, her pen was no longer able to absorb her attention, to keep her mind from wandering.  The solitude of her desk gave her the feeling of a prison.  Her body made perpetual claims upon her, as though it were some restless, fretful child, dragging her out into the streets without knowing where it wanted to go, discontented with everything it did:  then hurrying her back to fling itself upon a chair, weary, but still dissatisfied.

If only she could do something.  She was sick of thinking.