gibeing you if you lose it!" He took a
step towards where Tishy was sitting, and put his hand under his chin.

Her bright water-grey eyes were alight with mutiny; she laughed
defiantly.

"Suppose I don't want it!"

Her father looked steadily at her; he saw, as clearly as if she had
spoken, that the suggestion had excited her.

"Well, Babs," he said, with the laugh that always seemed an octave
higher than matched with his voice, "if you're able to bring him to
your feet--and I'm not saying you will! You might find it a bit of a
job too!--you'll want a dandy pair of shoes on them! Put this in your
pocket."

He had taken a ten-pound note out of his pocket-book, and he pushed it
into Tishy's strong and supple white hand.

CHAPTER XXXV

Great pain paralyses the mind, as the torture of a limb makes the limb
faint and helpless. When the heart-pain can be dealt with as a
separate thing, it is no longer supreme.

This was the difference between Christian and Larry. Her love was
herself, indivisible, a condition of her being. When it ceased, it
would mean that the creature that called herself Christian
Talbot-Lowry had ceased also. During the long, bright morning, after
Larry and Dr. Mangan had departed together, she felt that this had
happened; that the part of her that knew and suffered had gone away,
or was lying dead in her. There was a weight in her breast, she could
feel it, but she scarcely felt pain, only a great bewilderment, an
incredulity that this thing, of whose reality her mind told her, but
without conviction, should have happened to her, just precisely to
her, out of all the people in the world. People have felt this when
that iron shutter that is called Death has fallen between them and
that one who was their share of the world. A part of them, some
plausible imitation of them, can speak and act, and be extolled,
perhaps, for facing the music stoutly; while the stricken thing that
is themselves, is lying prone before the iron shutter; beating on it
with broken hands, calling, and hearing no answer.

It was nearly a month now since Dick Talbot-Lowry had asserted his
paternal rights, and had, following various classic and biblical
precedents, sacrificed his daughter to his own particular formulae of
religion and politics. He would never know that it had been the appeal
that weakness makes to strength that had given him his victory. When
he spoke to Lady Isabel of his scene with Larry, he told h