“Yet there was some quality in that girl's nature—call it generosity, call it a sense of fatality, call it anything you like—that would not let her speak out, even at the end, and denounce a person who had once been her friend. She feels that an evil destiny has got her and will never let her go. She has at best only a few months more to live. She lies now in a hospital, sick and dispirited and without hope. What do you think of it all?”
Miles rose to his feet.
“I'm going to her,” he said.
There was a sharp scraping noise on the carpet as Barbara Morell pushed her chair back. Barbara's eyes were opened wide.
“Miles, don't be a fool!”
“I'm going to her.”
Then it all poured out.
“Listen,” said Barbara, resting her hands on the table and speaking quietly but very fast. “You're not in love with her. I knew that when you told me about Pamela Hoyt and the dream you had. She's just the same as Pamela Hoyt; unreal, a dust-image out of old books, a dream you've created in your own mind.
“Listen, Miles! That's what threw the spell over you. You're an idealist and you've never been anything else. Whatever—whatever mad plan you've got in your head, it could only end in disaster even before she died. Miles, for heaven's sake!”
He went over to the chair where he had left his hat.
Barbara Morell—sincere, sympathetic, advising him for his own good as Marion did—let her voice rise to a small scream.
“Miles, it's silly! Think what she is!”
“I don't gibe a curse what she is,” he said. “I'm going to her.”
And once more Miles Hammond went out of the little dining-room at Beltring's, and hurried down the private stairs into the rain.