The morning was bleary and sodden, and Lucy regarded it with distaste. The waking-bell had sounded as usual at five-thirty, although on the morning after the Demonstration there were no classes before breakfast. College might make concessions but it did not discard its habits. She tried to fall asleep again, but reality had come with the daylight, and what had been feverish theory in the dark hours was now chill fact. In an hour or two she would have pressed that button, and altered beyond computing lives of whose existence she was not even aware. Her heart began to thud again.

Oh, dear, why had she ever come to this place!

It was when she had finished dressing and was sticking a few invisible hairpins into appropriate places that she realised that she could not go to Henrietta about the rosette without first going to Innes. She was not sure whether this was a remnant of some childish conception of “playing fair” or whether she was just trying to find a way of breaking the matter that would make her own personal responsibility less absolute.

She went to Innes’s door, quickly before the impulse to action should evaporate, and knocked. She had heard Innes come back from her bath and reckoned that by now she must be dressed.

The Innes who opened the door looked tired and heavy-eyed but composed. Now that she was face to face with her Lucy found it difficult to identify her with the Innes of her disturbed thoughts last night.

“Do you mind coming into my room for a moment?” she asked.

Innes hesitated, looked uncertain for a second, and then recovered herself. “Yes, of course,” she said; and followed Lucy.

“What a night of rain it was,” she said brightly.

It was unlike Innes to bother with remarks about the weather. And it was exceedingly unlike Innes to be bright.

Lucy took the little silver rosette out of her drawer and held it out on her palm for Innes to see.

“Do you know what that is?” she asked.

In a second the brightness had disappeared and Innes’s face was hard and wary.

“Where did you get that?” she snapped.

It was only then that Lucy realised how, deep down, she had counted on Innes’s reaction being different. How, unconsciously, she had expected Innes to say: “It looks like something off a dancing pump; lots of us have them.” Her heart stopped thudding and sank into her stomach.

“I found it on the gymnasium floor very early yesterday morning,” she said.

The hard wariness melted into a slow despair.

“And why do you show it to me?” Innes said dully.

“Because I understand that there is only one pair of those old-fashioned pumps in College.”

There was silence. Lucy laid the little object down on the table and waited.

“Am I wrong?” she asked at last.

“No.”

There was another silence.

“You don’t understand, Miss Pym,” she said in a burst, “it wasn’t meant to be ——. I know you’ll think I’m just trying to white-wash it, but it was never meant to be — to be the way it turned out. It was because I was so sick about missing Arlinghurst — I practically lost my reason over that for a time — I behaved like an idiot. It got so that I couldn’t think of anything in the world but Arlinghurst. And this was just to be a way of — of letting me have a second chance at it. It was never meant to be more than that. You must believe that. You must ——”

“But of course I believe it. If I didn’t I don’t suppose I should be sharing the knowledge of this with you.” She indicated the rosette.

After a moment Innes said: “What are you going to do?”

“Oh, dear God, I don’t know,” said poor Lucy, helpless now that she was face to face with reality. All the crimes she had met with were in slick detective stories where the heroine, however questionable, was invariably innocent, or in case-histories where the crime was safely over with and put away and a matter only for the scalpel. All those subjects of case-history record had had friends and relations whose stunned disbelief must have been very like her own, but the knowledge was neither comfort nor guide to her. This was the kind of thing that happened to other people — happened daily if one could believe the Press — but could not possibly happen to oneself.

How could one believe that someone one had laughed and talked with, liked and admired, shared a communal life with, could be responsible for another’s death?

She found herself beginning to tell Innes of her sleepless night, of her theories about “disposing,” of her reluctance to destroy half a dozen lives because of one person’s crime. She was too absorbed in her own problem to notice the dawning hope in Innes’s eyes. It was only when she heard herself saying: “Of course you cannot possibly be allowed to profit by Rouse’s death,” that she realised how far she had already come along the road that she had had no intention of travelling.

But Innes pounced on this. “Oh, but I won’t, Miss Pym. And it has nothing to do with your finding the little ornament. I knew last night when I heard that she was dead that I couldn’t go to Arlinghurst. I was going to tell Miss Hodge this morning. I was awake too last night. Facing a lot of things. Not only my responsibility for Rouse’s death — my inability to take defeat and like it. But — oh, well, a lot of things that wouldn’t interest you.” She paused a moment, considering Lucy. “Look, Miss Pym, if I were to spend the rest of my life atoning for yesterday morning will you — would you —” She could not put so brazen a suggestion into words, even after Lucy’s dissertation on justice.

“Become an accessory after the fact?”

The ............