When they went upstairs together and parted for the night, the clinging of Rosy’s embrace was for a moment almost convulsive.  But she tried to laugh off its suggestion of intensity.

“I held you tight so that I could feel sure that you were real and would not melt away,” she said.  “I hope you will be here in the morning.”

“I shall never really go quite away again, now I have come,” Betty answered.  “It is not only your house I have come into.  I have come back into your life.”

After she had entered her room and locked the door she sat down and wrote a letter to her father.  It was a long letter, but a clear one.  She painted a definite and detailed picture and made distinct her chief point.

“She is afraid of me,” she wrote.  “That is the first and worst obstacle.  She is actually afraid that I will do something which will only add to her trouble.  She has lived under dominion so long that she has forgotten that there are people who have no reason for fear.  Her old life seems nothing but a dream.  The first thing I must teach her is that I am to be trusted not to do futile things, and that she need neither be afraid of nor for me.”

After writing these sentences she found herself leaving her desk and walking up and down the room to relieve herself.  She could not sit still, because suddenly the blood ran fast and hot through her veins.  She put her hands against her cheeks and laughed a little, low laugh.

“I feel violent,” she said.  “I feel violent and I must get over it.  This is rage.  Rage is worth nothing.”

It was rage—­the rage of splendid hot blood which surged in answer to leaping hot thoughts.  There would have been a sort of luxury in giving way to the sway of it.  But the self-indulgence would have been no aid to future action.  Rage was worth nothing.  She said it as the first Reuben Vanderpoel might have said of a useless but glittering weapon.  “This gun is worth nothing,” and cast it aside.

CHAPTER XIV

IN THE GARDENS

She came out upon the stone terrace again rather early in the morning.  She wanted to wander about in the first freshness of the day, which was always an uplifting thing to her.  She wanted to see the dew on the grass and on the ragged flower borders and to hear the tender, broken fluting of birds in the trees.  One cuckoo was calling to another in the park, and she stopped and listened intently.  Until yesterday she had never heard a cuckoo call, and its hollow mellowness gave her delight.  It meant the spring in England, and nowhere else.