so very little
in present circumstances, and it remained stored.

Her life became insupportably dreary; she could not take walks, and had
no interest in going for drives, or, indeed, in travelling anywhere.
Nearly two years passed without an event, and still she looked on that
suburban road, thinking of the village in which she had been born, and
whither she would have gone back--O how gladly!--even to work in the
fields.

Taking no exercise, she often could not sleep, and would rise in the
night or early morning and look out upon the then vacant thoroughfare,
where the lamps stood like sentinels waiting for some procession to go
by. An approximation to such a procession was indeed made early every
morning about one o'clock, when the country vehicles passed up with loads
of vegetables for Covent Garden market. She often saw them creeping
along at this silent and dusky hour--waggon after waggon, bearing green
bastions of cabbages nodding to their fall, yet never falling, walls of
baskets enclosing masses of beans and peas, pyramids of snow-white
turnips, swaying howdahs of mixed produce--creeping along behind aged
night-horses, who seemed ever patiently wondering between their hollow
coughs why they had always to work at that still hour when all other
sentient creatures were privileged to rest. Wrapped in a cloak, it was
soothing to watch and sympathize with them when depression and
nervousness hindered sleep, and to see how the fresh green-stuff
brightened to life as it came opposite the lamp, and how the sweating
animals steamed and shone with their miles of travel.

They had an interest, almost a charm, for Sophy, these semirural people
and vehicles moving in an urban atmosphere, leading a life quite distinct
from that of the daytime toilers on the same road. One morning a man who
accompanied a waggon-load of potatoes gazed rather hard at the
house-fronts as he passed, and with a curious emotion she thought his
form was familiar to her. She looked out for him again. His being an
old-fashioned conveyance, with a yellow front, it was easily
recognizable, and on the third night after she saw it a second time. The
man alongside was, as she had fancied, Sam Hobson, formerly gardener at
Gaymead, who would at one time have married her.

She had occasionally thought of him, and wondered if life in a cottage
with him would not have been a happier lot than the life she had
accepted. She had not thought of him passi