Page:Possession (1926).pdf/228

 to be done. . . ." Again she rose from her chair and walked over to the window. "You had best think it over." She turned and faced Ellen. "I will talk to Richard. I will not sail to-morrow. I will stay. It must be settled somehow, for the sake of all of us. . . . I have not forgotten Sabine. She must be considered." 

ItIT (with drop initial) [sic] was long after midnight when Ellen, entering the cabriolet at last, was driven off by the impatient Wilkes to the Babylon Arms. When she arrived, she found Clarence in the lower hall pacing up and down with a pitiful air of anxiety.

"I should have telephoned," she said, "but I forgot. I did not know how late it was. You see we talked for a long time afterward."

And then she kissed him gently, swept again by the old sense of pity. During all the drive home, in the long moments when she had been alone in the dark cabriolet, she had struggled, bitterly, with the puzzle that confronted her, knowing always in the back of her mind that whatever happened she could never run away with Richard Callendar. She might fall ill, she might die, she might go mad, but there were some things which she could not do. Deep down in her heart there was a force that was quite beyond her, a power that was an instinct, as much a physical thing as her very arms and hands. It was the part of her that was Hattie Tolliver.

There had been the other way out, but when she kissed Clarence she knew that it too was impossible. When she saw him waiting, his eyes wild with anxiety, his whole face suddenly lighted up with joy and adoration at sight of her, she knew too that she could never divorce him. His very weakness destroyed her, for she knew that if she had asked him he would have freed her. There