Christina. Milly surprised
herself with her own calm ruthlessness. She found that the gentle and
the cowardly can, when roused, be more cruel than the harsh and
fearless. Her letters to Christina were serene and impersonal. They
recognised a bond, but they defined its limits. They might have been
letters written to a former governess, with whom her relation had been
kindly but not fond. They never mentioned her husband's name, nor
alluded, even indirectly, to her mistimed love; and to ask Christina's
forgiveness again for her unjust arraignment of her would have been to
allude indirectly to it.

And Christina's letters made no appeal. They were infrequent, hardly
affectionate; amazingly tactful letters. Milly shrank in recognising how
tactful. It showed Christina's power that she should be so tactful,
should so master herself to a responsive calm. Milly had come to dread
Christina's tact, her patience and her reticence, more than all the
vehemence and passionate upbraidings of former years. Beneath the
careful words she knew that a profound, undying hope lay hidden; pain,
too, profound and undying. The thought of such hope, such pain, made
Milly feel at once the pity and the repulsion.

In none of Christina's letters was there any mention of her health.
Milly knew how fragile was her hold on life and how much had happened of
late to tax it; but it was with a shock of something unrealisable,
unbelievable, that she read one autumn morning, in a blurred and shaking
hand: "I am very ill--dying, they say. Come to me at once. I must tell
you something."

Christina dying. She had said that it would kill her. And what had she
not said to Christina that might not well have killed her? Milly was
stricken with dreadful remorse and horror.

She hastened to London.

The maid at the door of the little house in Sloane Street told her that
Mrs. Drent was rapidly sinking. Milly read reproach in her simple eyes.
"I did not know! Why was I not told?--Why was I not told?"--she repeated
to the nurse who came to meet her. Mrs. Drent, the nurse said, would not
have her sent for, but during these last few days she had become
slightly delirious and had spoken of something she wished to tell, had,
at last, insisted on writing herself. She could hardly live a day
longer. Heart-failure had made her illness fatal.

In the sick room, Milly paused at the door. Was that Christina? That
strange face with such phantom eyes? Christina's eyes did n