! It was! You did not care!--Oh don't be
cruel to me. I shall die if you leave me. What have I done that you
should change so?"

"You have done nothing, Christina," said Milly in a voice of schooled
forbearance. "It is I who have changed, and been cruel, first to Dick
and then to you. I am a shallow, feeble creature, but the shallowness
was in thinking that I couldn't love my husband--not in loving him now.
I don't want the things you and I had together. I only want the stupid,
simple things that he could have given me. I want someone to be in love
with me. That is it, I think. I am the most usual, common sort of woman,
who must have someone in love with her and be in love. And I am in love
with Dick. And I am too unhappy to think of anyone but myself."

Christina stood with her face covered. Convulsive sobs shook her.

"Good-bye," said Milly.

She did not reply. She moved her head a little, in negation?
acquiescence? appeal?--Milly did not know. And since Christina still
said nothing, she turned the handle softly and left her.

* * * * *

Milly went down to Chawlton. In the country, alone, she could sit and
look at her life and at the wreckage she had made in it without feeling
that another's eyes were watching her. It pained her, when she could
turn her mind from the humiliation of her own misery, to see how
completely all love for poor Christina had died from her, to see how the
perhaps crude and elemental love had killed the delicate, derivative
affection. It was even sadder to realise that under the superficial pain
lay a deep indifference. She was very sorry for Christina. She had
accepted Christina's life and used it, and now, through the strange
compulsion of fate, she must cut herself away from it, even if that were
to leave it broken and bleeding. For if she were to remain sorry for
Christina, to look back at her with pity and compunction, she must not
see her. Words, glances, silences of Christina's rankled in her, and
when she thought of them she could not forgive her. Christina had seen
too much, understood too much. She was a blight upon her love, a menace
to her tragic memory of it. Under everything, deeper than anything else
in her feeling about Christina, was a dim repulsion and dislike.

That Christina had submitted showed in her letters, for Milly, before
many days had passed, wrote kindly and mildly, in the tone which, for
the future, she intended to use towards