She had quite broken down now, and her natural self was come back to us.  When we came home, I got her up to her own room and Dermot went to his mother.  She had a long, quiet sleep, lying on her bed, and when she woke it was growing dark on the May evening.  She looked at me a little while without speaking, and her eyes were soft again.

“Lucy,” she said, “I think I have been very naughty, but they made me so.”

I said, as I kissed her, that I thought “they” had done so.

“He would not have let anybody make him so,” she said.  “I was the bad one.  I was almost unfaithful.  I told him so to-day.”

“Not unfaithful, dearest, only harassed and miserable beyond all bearing.”

“Nothing is beyond bearing.  I said so to myself over and over again.  That was why I would let no one see that I minded.”

“You tried to bear it proudly, all by yourself,” I said; “that was what made it so dreadful.”

“He said it was God’s will,” said poor Viola, “but I knew it was mamma’s.  I did what he told me, Lucy; I did not get so wrong as long as he lived, but after that I did not care what became of me, and yet I did love him as much as ever.”

She seemed to look on me as his representative, and was now ready to take any persuasion of mine as coming from him.  She admitted her mother, was gentle and natural with her, ate and drank at her bidding, and went to bed pale and worn down, but not ill.  She never gave in or professed indisposition, but for more than ten days she “went softly,” was very tired, and equal to nothing but lying on the sofa and sitting in the garden; and it was in those days that sometimes with her brother, sometimes with me, she went over all that we could tell her, or she tell us, of him who had been so dear to us all.  The first time she was alone with Dermot, she kissed every remaining mark she could find in his face, and said she had ached to do it every time she saw him.  All those wells of deeper thought that had been so long choked by the stony hardness of a proudly-borne sorrow seemed suddenly to open, when she gave herself up to the thought of Harold.  She even arrived at sorrow for the way she had treated her mother; when he had given up his own hope rather than make her disobedient.  She asked Lady Diana’s pardon.  She had never done so voluntarily in her whole life.  She was met by tears and humility that softened and humiliated her in her sorrow more than aught else.  Her precious flower-pot was in her window with its fragrant verbena, and I gave her the crystal cross again, telling her where I had found it, and she held it a moment and said, “Some day it will be buried with me.  But I must do something to feel as if I deserved it.  You know it comes to me like a token out of the sea of glass like unto crystal, where they stand that overcome!  I think I’ll only wear it at night when I think I have done something, or conquered a bit of my perverseness with mamma.”