Part 68 (2/2)

She was moving, slowly, but without pause, her hands held out in front of her, the ground still beneath her slipping feet, which felt oddly weighted. Once she began to pull the woollen scarf over her mouth, but with the sense of breathlessness came the beginning of panic, and she tore it away again.

”Go on--coward--coward,” she urged herself. ”Remember what it would mean to make another muddle of this, and to fail.”

The cold invaded her body and her teeth began to chatter.

For an instant she stood, surrounded by the silent water, cold and terror and the weight of her now sodden clothing paralysing her, so that she could move neither backwards to the sh.o.r.e nor forward into the blackness in front of her.

”I must,” muttered Alex, and wrenched one foot desperately out of the mud below. With the forward movement, she lost her balance, and her hands clutched instinctively at the water's level. Then the clogging bottom of the pond sheered away suddenly from beneath her, and there was only water, dark and icy and rus.h.i.+ng, above and below and all round her.

x.x.x

Epitaph

They sat round, afterwards, in the Clevedon Square drawing-room--all the people who had helped misguided, erring Alex, according to their lights, or again, according to their limitations, and who had failed her so completely in the ultimate essential.

Pamela and her lover whispered together in the window.

”After all, you know,” hesitated the girl, ”she had nothing much to live for, poor Alex. She'd got out of touch with all of us--and she had no one of her very own.”

”Not like us.”

His hand closed for an instant over hers.

”There was no reason why she should not have come to us if--if she was in money difficulties,” reiterated Cedric uneasily. He consciously refrained from adding ”again.”

Violet was crying softly, lying back in the depths of a great arm-chair.

”Poor Alex! I never guessed Malden Road was like that. Why _did_ she go there? Oh, poor Alex!”

”You were nicer to her than any of us, Violet,” said Archie gruffly.

”She was awfully fond of you, wasn't she, and of the little kid?”

Barbara, hard and self-contained, gazed round the familiar room. For a moment it seemed to her that they were all children again, sent down from the nursery by old Nurse, on Lady Isabel's ”At Home” afternoon.

Her eyes met those of Cedric, who had taken up his stand against the mantelpiece, in his hand his gla.s.ses, which he was shaking with little, judicial jerks.

”Oh, Cedric,” said Barbara with a sudden catch in her voice.

”Don't you remember--Alex was such a _pretty_ little girl!”

London, 1917.

Bristol, 1918.

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