A quiver passed up from the heart so praised to the still lips.  No, she was not hard-hearted!  She could even feel for this old woman from whose voice anxiety had stolen its despotism.

“Eustace cannot live without his career.  His career is himself, he must be doing, and leading, and spending his powers.  What he has given you is not his true self.  I don’t want to hurt you, but the truth is the truth, and we must all bow before it.  I may be hard, but I can respect sorrow.”

To respect sorrow!  Yes, this grey visitor could do that, as the wind passing over the sea respects its surface, as the air respects the surface of a rose, but to penetrate to the heart, to understand her sorrow, that old age could not do for youth!  As well try to track out the secret of the twistings in the flight of those swallows out there above the river, or to follow to its source the faint scent of the lilies in that bowl!  How should she know what was passing in here—­this little old woman whose blood was cold?  And Audrey had the sensation of watching someone pelt her with the rind and husks of what her own spirit had long devoured.  She had a longing to get up, and take the hand, the chill, spidery hand of age, and thrust it into her breast, and say:  “Feel that, and cease!”

But, withal, she never lost her queer dull compassion for the owner of that white carved face.  It was not her visitor’s fault that she had come!  Again Lady Casterley was speaking.

“It is early days.  If you do not end it now, at once, it will only come harder on you presently.  You know how determined he is.  He will not change his mind.  If you cut him off from his work in life, it will but recoil on you.  I can only expect your hatred, for talking like this, but believe me, it’s for your good, as well as his, in the long run.”

A tumultuous heart-beating of ironical rage seized on the listener to that speech.  Her good!  The good of a corse that the breath is just abandoning; the good of a flower beneath a heel; the good of an old dog whose master leaves it for the last time!  Slowly a weight like lead stopped all that fluttering of her heart.  If she did not end it at once!  The words had now been spoken that for so many hours, she knew, had lain unspoken within her own breast.  Yes, if she did not, she could never know a moment’s peace, feeling that she was forcing him to a death in life, desecrating her own love and pride!  And the spur had been given by another!  The thought that someone—­this hard old woman of the hard world—­should have shaped in words the hauntings of her love and pride through all those ages since Miltoun spoke to her of his resolve; that someone else should have had to tell her what her heart had so long known it must do—­this stabbed her like a knife!  This, at all events, she could not bear!

She stood up, and said: 

“Please leave me now!  I have a great many things to do, before I go.”