realised that she had been talking with
bravado--in fact she hid her head in the cushion of the chair and cried
for at least five minutes. Then she sat up and wiped her eyes because
she heard Aunt Anne coming. When Aunt Anne came towards her now she was
affected with a strange feeling of sickness. She told herself that that
was part of her illness. She did not hate Aunt Anne. For some weeks,
when she had risen slowly from the nightmare that the first period of
her illness had been, she hated Aunt Anne, hated her fiercely,
absorbingly, desperately. Then suddenly the hatred had left her, and
had she only known it she was from that moment never to hate any one
again. A quite new love for Martin was suddenly born in her, a love
that was, as yet, like the first faint stirring of the child in the
mother's womb. This new love was quite different from the old; that had
been acquisitive, possessive, urgent, restless, and often terribly
painful; this was tranquil, sure, utterly certain, and passive. The
immediate fruit of it was that she regarded all human creatures with a
lively interest, an interest too absorbing to allow of hatred or even
active dislike. Her love for Martin was now like a strong current in
her soul washing away all sense of irritation and anger. She regarded
people from a new angle. What were they all about? What were they
thinking? Had they too had some experience as marvellous as her meeting
with and parting from Martin? Probably; and they too were shy of
speaking of it. Her love for Martin slowly grew, a love now independent
of earthly contact and earthly desire, a treasure that would be hers so
long as life lasted, that no one could take from her.

She no longer hated Aunt Anne, but she did not intend to live with her
any more. So soon as she was well enough she would go. That moment of
physical contact when Aunt Anne had held her back made any more
relation between them impossible. There was now a great gulf fixed.

The loneliness, the sense of desperate loss, above all the agonising
longing for Martin, his step, his voice, his smile--she faced all these
and accepted them as necessary companions now on her life's journey,
but she did not intend to allow them to impede progress. She wondered
now about everybody. Her own experience had shown her what strange and
wonderful things occur to all human beings, and, in the face of this,
how could one hate or grudge or despise? She had a fellowship now with
all