hours of the trolley ride and the dark wanderings from Mrs. O’Brien’s to Mrs. Newbolt’s, the whole thing would seem simply ridiculous.  Some time, he must know that she loved him enough to buy Jacky for him, by dying—­or trying to die!  She would tell him, some time; because her purpose (even if it had failed) would measure the heights and depths of her love as nothing else could; but he must not know it now, because she hadn’t carried it out.  That first night, when she had found herself safe and warm (oh, warm!  She had thought she never would be warm any more!)—­when she had found herself in Mrs. Newbolt’s spare room in the four-poster with its chintz hangings and its great soft pillows, she had been glad she had not carried it out.  Glad not to be dead.  As she lay there, shivering slowly into delicious comfort, and fending off Mrs. Newbolt’s distracted questions, she had had occasional moments of a sense of danger escaped; perhaps it would have been wrong to—­to lie down there in the river?  People call it wicked Mrs. Newbolt, for a single suspicious instant ("She forgot it right off,” Eleanor said; “she just thought we’d quarreled!"); but Mrs. Newbolt had said it was “wicked.”  “But I didn’t do it!” Eleanor told herself in a rush of gratitude.  She hadn’t been “wicked”!  Instead, she was in Mrs. Newbolt’s spare room, looking dreamily at the old French clock on the mantelpiece, whose tarnished gilt face glimmered between two slender black-marble columns; sometimes she counted the tick-tock of the slowly swinging pendulum; sometimes, toward dawn, she watched the foggy yellow daylight peer between the red rep curtains; but counting, and looking, and drowsing, she was glad to be alive.  It was not until the next afternoon that she began to be faintly mortified at being alive.  It was then that she had felt that she must get that letter—­Maurice mustn’t see it!  Little by little, humiliation at her failure to be heroic, grew acute.  Maurice wouldn’t know that she loved him enough to give him Jacky; he would just know that she was silly.  She had got wet; and had a cold in her head.  Snuffles—­not Death.  He might—­laugh!...  It was then that she implored Mrs. Houghton to get the letter out of her desk.

Yet when it was given to her she held it in her hand under the bedclothes, saying to herself that she would not destroy it, yet, because, even though she had failed, there might come a time when it would prove to Maurice how much she loved him.  She was so absorbed in this thought that she did not grieve much for Bingo.  “Poor little Bingo,” she said, vaguely, when Mrs. Houghton told her that the little dog was dead; “he was so jealous.”  Now, with Maurice coming nearer every hour, she could not think of Bingo; she was face to face with a decision!  What should she tell him about the “accident”?