Page:Possession (1926).pdf/277

 I met him once, you know, coming out on the train to the West. He was going then to see a girl called. . ." She frowned slightly. "I've forgotten her name. . . ."

"Seton," murmured Ellen. "May Seton." Lily was rousing memories now, which seemed far away and yet were faintly painful.

"Seton! That was it! . . . I'd never heard of them and it seemed to hurt him. I wrote you when I heard of his death. The letter must have passed you."

"I never got it . . . perhaps it'll be forwarded."

"Had he been ill long?" She must have wondered at the look in Ellen's eyes. It was not a look of sorrow or desolation; rather it was a look of numb pain.

"He hadn't been ill at all." The girl frowned suddenly and looked out of the window. "All the same," she continued, "you might have said he had been ill for a long time." Then she rose and stood before the small panes looking out into the wet garden. "I've got to tell some one," she said with an air of desperation. "You see . . ." And her voice became barely audible. "You see . . . He killed himself."

The veil was torn away now. Between them there remained no barrier. Each had made her confession, Lily concerning the child, Ellen concerning her husband, and in the torrent of emotion which engulfed them Lily sat up and drew her cousin down to the bed beside her. They both wept and each (with as little real cause) pitied herself.

Ellen told her story, punctuated by sobs, from the beginning. She confessed that she had never had any love for Clarence. She spoke of many things which, at the time of the tragedy, were not clear to her and which she had come to understand later during the hours of solitude on windswept decks. In the emotion of the moment she understood the whole affair even more clearly. She told Lily that she had tried, valiantly, to make Clarence happy. She had done her best to preserve his happiness