ce of food, raiment,
warmth. But she was utterly ignorant of its mechanism, and she wished to
remain ignorant. That its mechanism should be in danger of breaking
down, that it should even creak, was to her at first less a disaster
than a matter for resentment. She hated the works as one is sometimes
capable of unreasonably hating a benefactor.

On Monday morning, rising a little earlier than usual, she was surprised
to find her mother alone at a disordered breakfast-table.

'Has dad finished his breakfast already?' she inquired, determined to be
cheerful. Sleep, and her fundamental good-nature, had modified her
mood, and for the moment she meant to play the role of dutiful daughter
as well as she could.

'He has had to go off to Manchester by the first train,' said Leonora.
'He'll be away all day. So you won't begin till to-morrow.' She smiled
gravely.

'Oh, good!' Ethel exclaimed with intense momentary relief.

But now again in Leonora's voice, and in her eye, there was the soft
warning, which Ethel seized, and which, without a relevant word spoken,
she communicated to her sisters. John Stanway's young women began to
reflect apprehensively upon the sudden irregularities of his recent
movements, his conferences with his lawyer, his bluffing air; a hundred
trifles too insignificant for separate notice collected themselves
together and became formidable. A certain atmosphere of forced and false
cheerfulness spread through the house.

'Not gone to bed!' said Stanway briskly, when he returned home by the
late train and discovered his three girls in the drawing-room. They
allowed him to imagine that his jaunty air deceived them; they were
jaunty too; but all the while they read his soul and pitied him with the
intolerable condescension of youth towards age.

The next day Ethel had a further reprieve of several hours, for Stanway
said that he must go over to Hanbridge in the morning, and would come
back to Hillport for dinner, and escort Ethel to the works immediately
afterwards. None asked a question, but everyone knew that he could only
be going to Hanbridge to consult with David Dain. This time the
programme was in fact executed. At two o'clock Ethel found herself in
her father's office.

As she took off her hat and jacket in the hard sinister room, she looked
like a violet roughly transplanted and bidden to blossom in the mire.
She knew that amid that environment she could be nothing but incapable,
dull, stupid,