ble. Like the furniture of her house, it struck her as
symbolic in its bareness of the sturdier virtues. The people who lived
in it must of necessity be frugal and hard-working if they would live at
all, wresting by sheer labour their life from the soil, braced by the
long winters to endurance and self-denial, their vices and their
languors frozen out of them whether they would or no. At least so
thought Anna, as she stood gazing out across the clearing at the fields
and sky. "Could one not be good here? Could one not be so, so good?" she
kept on murmuring. Then she remembered that she had been asking herself
vague questions like this ever since her arrival; and with a sudden
determination to face what was in her mind and think it out honestly,
she sat down on a tree stump, buttoned her coat up tight, for the wind
was blowing full on her, and fell to considering what she meant to do.

* * * * *

Susie did not go down to breakfast, but stayed in her bedroom on the
sofa drinking a glass of milk into which an egg had been beaten, and
listening to Hilton's criticisms of the German nation, delivered with
much venom while she packed. But Hilton, though her contempt for German
ways was so great as to be almost unutterable, was reconciled to a
mistress who had so quickly given in to her wish to be taken back to
Hill Street, and the venom was of an abstract nature, containing no
personal sting of unfavourable comparisons with duchesses; so that Susie
was sipping her milk in a fairly placid frame of mind when there was a
knock at the door, and Anna asked if she might come in.

"Oh, yes, come in. Have you looked out the trains?"

"Yes. There's only one decent one, and you'll have to leave directly
after luncheon. Won't you stay, Susie? You'll be so tired, going home
without resting."

"Can't we leave before luncheon?"

"Yes, of course, if you prefer to lunch at Stralsund."

"Much. Have you ordered the shandrydan?"

"Yes, for half-past one."

"Then order it for half-past twelve. Hilton can drive with me."

"So I thought."

"Has that wretch been rubbing fish oil on it again?"

"I don't think so, after what I said yesterday."

"I shouldn't think what you said yesterday could have frightened him
much. You beamed at him as though he were your best friend."

"Did I?"

Anna was looking odd, Susie thought, and answering her remarks with a
nervous, abstracted air. She had apparently been out