eighbourhood
and in her own eyes, but she had not time to be thinking of it always.
Visits to Rye, either to her lawyers or to the decorators and
paper-hangers, the engaging of extra hands, both temporary and
permanent, for the extra work, the supervising of labourers and workmen
whom she never could trust to do their job without her ... all these
crowded her cares into a few hours of evening or an occasionally wakeful
night.

But every now and then she must suffer. Sometimes she would be
overwhelmed, in the midst of all her triumphant business, with a sense
of personal failure. She had succeeded where most women are hopeless
failures, but where so many women are successful and satisfied she had
failed and gone empty. She had no home, beyond what was involved in the
walls of this ancient dwelling, the womb and grave of her existence--she
had lost the man she loved, had been unable to settle herself
comfortably with another, and now she had lost Ellen, the little sister,
who had managed to hold at least a part of that over-running love, which
since Martin's death had had only broken cisterns to flow into.

The last catastrophe now loomed the largest. Joanna no longer shed tears
for Martin, but she shed many for Ellen, either into her own pillow, or
into the flowery quilt of the flowery room which inconsequently she held
sacred to the memory of the girl who had despised it. Her grief for
Ellen was mixed with anxiety and with shame. What would become of her?
Joanna could not, would not, believe that she would never come back. Yet
what if she came?... In Joanna's eyes, and in the eyes of all the
neighbourhood, Ellen had committed a crime which raised a barrier
between her and ordinary folk. Between Ellen and her sister now stood
the wall of strange, new conditions--conditions that could ignore the
sonorous Thou Shalt Not, which Joanna never saw apart from Mr. Pratt in
his surplice and hood, standing under the Lion and the Unicorn, while
all the farmers and householders of the Marsh murmured into their Prayer
Books--"Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this
law." She could not think of Ellen without this picture rising up
between them, and sometimes in church she would be overwhelmed with a
bitter shame, and in the lonely enclosure of her great cattle-box pew
would stuff her fingers into her ears, so that she should not hear the
dreadful words of her sister's condemnation.

She had moments, too, of an