The habit of confidence prompted Nancy to seek Mary Woodruff, and show her the long-expected letter.  But for Barmby’s visit she would have done so.  As it was, her mind sullenly resisted the natural impulse.  Forlorn misery, intensified by successive humiliations, whereof the latest was the bitterest, hardened her even against the one, the indubitable friend, to whom she had never looked in vain for help and solace.  Of course it was not necessary to let Mary know with what heart-breaking coldness Tarrant had communicated the fact of his return; but she preferred to keep silence altogether.  Having sunk so low as to accept, with semblance of gratitude, pompous favours, dishonouring connivance, at the hands of Samuel Barmby, she would now stand alone in her uttermost degradation.  Happen what might, she would act and suffer in solitude.

Something she had in mind to do which Mary, if told of it, would regard with disapproval.  Mary was not a deserted and insulted wife; she could reason and counsel with the calmness of one who sympathised, but had nothing worse to endure.  Even Mary’s sympathy was necessarily imperfect, since she knew not, and should never know, what had passed in the crucial interviews with Beatrice French, with Jessica Morgan, and with Samuel Barmby.  Bent on indulging her passionate sense of injury, hungering for a taste of revenge, however poor, Nancy executed with brief delay a project which had come into her head during the hour of torture just elapsed.

She took a sheet of notepaper, and upon it wrote half-a-dozen lines, thus: 

’As your reward for marrying me is still a long way off, and as you tell me that you are in want, I send you as much as I can spare at present.  Next month you shall hear from me again.’

Within the paper she folded a five-pound note, and placed both in an envelope, which she addressed to Lionel Tarrant, Esq., at his lodgings in Westminster.  Having posted this at the first pillar-box she walked on.

Her only object was to combat mental anguish by bodily exercise, to distract, if possible, the thoughts which hammered upon her brain by moving amid the life of the streets.  In Camberwell Road she passed the place of business inscribed with the names ‘Lord and Barmby’; it made her think, not of the man who, from being an object of her good-natured contempt, was now become a hated enemy, but of her father, and she mourned for him with profounder feeling than when her tears flowed over his new-made grave.  But for headstrong folly, incredible in the retrospect, that father would have been her dear and honoured companion, her friend in every best sense of the word, her guide and protector.  Many and many a time had he invited her affection, her trust.  For long years it was in her power to make him happy, and, in doing so, to enrich her own life, to discipline her mind as no study of books, even had it been genuine, ever could.  Oh, to have the time back again—­the despised privilege—­the thwarted embittered love!  She was beginning to understand her father, to surmise with mature intelligence the causes of his seeming harshness.  To her own boy, when he was old enough, she would talk of him and praise him.  Perhaps, even thus late, his spirit of stern truthfulness might bear fruit in her life and in her son’s.