it. Why, she'd
understand, time and again, without his saying anything. That came of
being educated. It came (poor Rose was driven back to it at every turn)
of being a lady.

She might have known how it would be. And in a way she had known it from
the first. That was why she'd been against it, and why Uncle and Aunt
and her master and mistress down at Fleet had been against it too. But
there--she loved him. Lady or no lady, she loved him.

As for his going away with Mrs. Brodrick, she "looked at it sensible."
She understood. She saw the excuses that could be made for him. She
couldn't understand _her_; she couldn't find one excuse for _her_
behaviour, a married woman, leaving her husband--such a good man, and
her children--her little helpless children, and going off for weeks
together with a married man, let him be who he might be. Still, if it
hadn't been her, it might have been somebody else, somebody much worse.
It might have been that Miss Lempriere. If _she_'d had a hold on him,
_she_'d not have let him go.

For deep-bedded in Rose's obscure misery was the conviction that Jane
Brodrick had let him go. Her theory of Jane's guilt had not gone much
farther than the charge of deserting her little helpless children. It
was as if Rose's imagination could not conceive of guilt beyond that
monstrous crime. And Jane had gone back to her husband and children,
after all.

If it had been Miss Lempriere she would have been bound to have stuck,
she having nothing, so to speak, to go back to.

The question was, what was George coming back to? If it was to her,
Rose, he must know pretty well what. He must know, she kept repeating to
herself; he must know. Her line, the sensible line that she had been so
long considering, was somehow to surprise and defeat his miserable
foreknowledge.

By Sunday morning she had decided on her line. Nothing would turn her.
She did not intend to ask anybody's advice, nor to take it were it
offered. The line itself required the co-operation and, in a measure,
the consent of Aunt and Uncle; and on the practical head they were
consulted. She managed that on Sunday afternoon. Then she remembered
that she would have to tell Mr. and Mrs. Prothero.

It was on Sunday evening that she told them.

She told them, very shortly and simply, that she had made up her mind to
separate from Tanqueray and live with her uncle.

"Uncle'll be glad to 'ave me," she said.

She explained. "_He_'ll think more of