So she made up her mind at last.  This was the end of her struggling.  She could not let her old father be turned out of house and home to starve, for practically they would starve.  She knew her hateful lover well enough to be aware that he would show no mercy.  It was a question of the woman or the money, and she was the woman.  Either she must let him take her or they must be destroyed; there was no middle course.  And in these circumstances there was no room for hesitation.  Once more her duty became clear to her.  She must give up her life, she must give up her love, she must give up herself.  Well, so be it.  She was weary of the long endeavour against fortune, now she would yield and let the tide of utter misery sweep over her like a sea—­to bear her away till at last it brought her to that oblivion in which perchance all things come right or are as though they had never been.

She had scarcely spoken to her lover, Harold Quaritch, for some weeks.  She had as she understood it entered into a kind of unspoken agreement with her father not to do so, and that agreement Harold had realised and respected.  Since their last letters to each other they had met once or twice casually or at church, interchanged a few indifferent words, though their eyes spoke another story, touched each other’s hands and parted.  That was absolutely all.  But now that Ida had come to this momentous decision she felt he had a right to learn it, and so once more she wrote to him.  She might have gone to see him or told him to meet her, but she would not.  For one thing she did not dare to trust herself on such an errand in his dear company, for another she was too proud, thinking if her father came to hear of it he might consider that it had a clandestine and underhand appearance.

And so she wrote.  With all she said we need not concern ourselves.  The letter was loving, even passionate, more passionate perhaps than one would have expected from a woman of Ida’s calm and stately sort.  But a mountain may have a heart of fire although it is clad in snows, and so it sometimes is with women who seem cold and unemotional as marble.  Besides, it was her last chance—­she could write him no more letters and she had much to say.

“And so I have decided, Harold,” she said after telling him of all her doubts and troubles.  “I must do it, there is no help for it, as I think you will see.  I have asked for ten days’ respite.  I really hardly know why, except that it is a respite.  And now what is there left to say to you except good-bye?  I love you, Harold, I make no secret of it, and I shall never love any other.  Remember all your life that I love you and have not forgotten you, and never can forget.  For people placed as we are there is but one hope—­the grave.  In the grave earthly considerations fail and earthly contracts end, and there I trust and believe we shall find each other—­or at the least forgetfulness.  My heart is so sore I know not