e religiosity. Ah! If she could have been a
Roman Catholic, genuine and convinced--with what ardour would she have
cast herself down before the confessional, and whispered her sinfulness
to the mysterious face within; and with what ecstasy would she have
received the absolution--that cleansing bath of the soul! Then--she
could have recommenced!... But she was not a Roman Catholic. She could
no more become a Roman Catholic than she could become the queen of some
romantic Latin country of palaces and cathedrals. She was a young
provincial girl staying in a boarding-house at Hornsey, on the Great
Northern line out of London, and she was suffering from nervous
breakdown. Such was the exterior common sense of the situation.

Occasionally the memory of some verse of Victor Hugo, sounding the beat
of one of his vast melancholies, would float through her mind and cause
it to vibrate for an instant with a mournful sensation that resembled
pleasure.

IV

"Are you thinking of getting up, dear?" asked Sarah Gailey, as she
arranged more securely the contents of the tray and found space on it
for her weekly books.

"Yes, I suppose I may as well," Hilda murmured. "It'll be lunch-time
soon." The days were long, yet somehow they seemed short too. Already
before getting up, she would begin to think of the evening and of going
to bed; and Saturday night followed quickly on Monday morning. It was
scarcely credible that sixteen weeks had passed, thus, since her
mother's death,--sixteen weeks whose retrospect showed no achievement of
any kind, and hardly a desire.

"I've given those Boutwoods notice," said Sarah Gailey suddenly, the
tray in her hands ready to lift.

"Not really?"

"They were shockingly late for breakfast again, this morning, both of
them. And Mr. Boutwood had the face to ask for another egg. Hettie came
and told me, so I went in myself. I told him breakfast was served in my
house at nine o'clock, and there was a notice to that effect in the
bedrooms, not to mention the dining-room. And as good a breakfast as
they'd get in any of their hotels, I lay! If the eggs are cold at ten
o'clock and after, that's not my fault. They're both of them perfectly
healthy, and yet they're bone-idle. They never want to go to bed and
they never want to get up. It isn't as if they went to theatres and got
home late and so on. I could make excuses for that--now and then. No!
It's just idleness and carelessness. And if you saw their bed