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 been fighting all along," thought Olivia.) Aloud she said, "Sabine, you must leave me in peace. It's for me alone to settle."

"I don't want you to do a thing you will regret the rest of your life . . . bitterly."

"You mean. . . ."

"Oh, I mean simply to give him up."

Again Olivia was silent, and Sabine asked suddenly, "Have you had a call from a Mr. Gavin? A gentleman with a bald head and a polished face?"

Olivia looked at her sharply. "How could you know that?"

"Because I sent him, my dear . . . for the same reason that I'm here now . . . because I wanted you to do something . . . to act. And I'm confessing now because I thought you ought to know the truth, since I'm going away. Otherwise you might think Aunt Cassie or Anson had done it . . . and trouble might come of that."

Again Olivia said nothing; she was lost in a sadness over the thought that, after all, Sabine was no better than the others.

"It's not easy to act in this house," Sabine was saying. "It's not easy to do anything but pretend and go on and on until at last you are an old woman and die. I did it to help you . . . for your own good."

"That's what Aunt Cassie always says."

The shaft went home, for it silenced Sabine, and in the moment's pause Sabine seemed less a woman than an amazing, disembodied, almost malevolent force. When she answered, it was with a shrug of the shoulders and a bitter smile which seemed doubly bitter on the frankly painted lips. "I suppose I am like Aunt Cassie. I mightn't have been, though. . . . I might have been just a pleasant normal person . . . like Higgins or one of the servants."