Sylvia took to going out alone every evening, whether it rained or blew, to seek in the streets relief from the silence of the desolate house. Loneliness came to seem to her the worst suffering imaginable, and the fear of it which was bred during these months haunted her for years to come.
In November, about half past eight of a windy night, Sylvia came back from one of her solitary walks and found her father sitting with a bottle of brandy in the kitchen. His face was haggard; his collar was loose; from time to time he mopped his forehead with a big blue handkerchief and stared at himself in a small cracked shaving-glass that he must have brought down from his bedroom. She asked if he were ill, and he told her not to worry him, but to go out and borrow a railway time-table.
When Sylvia returned she heard Valentine's angry voice in the kitchen, and waited in the passage to know the cause of the dispute.
"No, I won't come with you," Valentine was saying. "You must be mad! If you're in danger of going to prison, so much the worse for you. I've got plenty of people who'll look after me."
"Stepfather! Fine stepfather! Why, I hate you! Do you hear? I hate you! My man is waiting for me now, and he'll laugh when he hears that a convict wants his step-daughter to go away with him. My mother may have loved you, but I'd like her to see you now. _L'amour de sa vie. Son homme! Sa poupée, sa poupée! Ah, mais non alors! Sa poupée!"_
Sylvia could not bear any longer this mockery of her mother's love, and, bursting into the kitchen, she began to abuse Valentine with all the vulgar words she had learned from Blanche.
Valentine caught her sister by the shoulders and shook her violently:
_"Tu seras bien avec ton père, sale gosse!"_
Then she smacked her cheek several times and left the house.
"Take me with you," she cried. "You hate her, don't you? Take me, father."
Henry rose and, in rising, upset the bottle of brandy.
"Thank God," he said, fervently. "My own daughter still loves me."
Sylvia perceived nothing ludicrous in the tone of her father's speech, and happy tears rose to her eyes.
"See! here is the time-table. Must we go to-night? Sha'n't we go to-night?"
She helped her father to pack; at midnight they were in the train going north.