Page:Possession (1926).pdf/376

 any one in the world? I won't have it. Who are you to speak like that of Lily. . . my own cousin?"

"Lily who has helped you!" screamed Rebecca. "And what of me? What of me?" She began to beat her thin breasts in a kind of fury. Her nose became a beak, her small eyes red and furious. "Have I done nothing? Am I no one, to be cast aside like this? What of the work I have done, the slaving?"

For a moment they stood facing each other, silent and furious, close in a primitive fashion to blows. There was silence because their anger had reached a point beyond all words and here each held herself in check. It was Ellen who broke the silence. She began to laugh, softly and bitterly.

"Perhaps you're right," she said in a low voice. "I do owe you a great deal . . . as much, really, as I owe to Lily. It has given you the right to a certain hold upon me."

(But the difference, she knew, was this—that Lily would never exert her right of possession.)

"You can't go," continued Rebecca, "not now. Think of it . . . all the years of sacrifice and work, gone for nothing. Can't you see that fate has delivered triumph into your hands. If you turn your back upon it now, you'd be nothing less than a fool." She saw in a sudden flash another argument and thrust it into the conflict. "Always you have taken advantage of opportunity. . . . You told me so yourself. . . . And now when the greatest chance of all is at hand, you turn your back on it. I can't understand you. Why should you suddenly be so thoughtful of Lily?"

Ellen sat down and fell to looking out of the window. "Perhaps you're right," she said. "I'll think it out . . . more clearly perhaps."

There was, after all, nothing that she could do. The old despair swept over her, taking the place of her pessimistic anger. She could not go to the front, among the soldiers, to comfort Callendar. He would have been the last to want her there. 