rst, Sarah next, and Hilda last, cautiously down a short, dark
flight of stone steps beneath the stairs; the servant followed. At the
foot a gas-jet burned.

"Those Watchetts might be the landladies!" muttered Sarah, strangely
ignoring the propinquity of the maid; and sniffed.

Hilda gave a short, uneasy laugh. She had a desire to laugh loudly and
wildly, and by so doing to snap the nervous tension, which seemed to
grow tighter and tighter every minute. Her wretchedness had become so
exquisite that she could begin to enjoy it, to savour it like a
pleasure.

And she thought, with conscious and satisfied grimness:

"So this is Brighton!"

CHAPTER IV
THE SEA

I

In the evening Hilda, returning from a short solitary walk as far as the
West Pier, found Sarah Gailey stooping over her open trunks in the
bedroom which had been assigned to her. There were two quite excellent
though low-ceiled rooms, of which this was one, in the basement; the
other was to be used as a private parlour by the managers of the house.
At night, with the gas lighted and the yellow blind drawn and the loose
bundle of strips paper gleaming in the grate, the bedroom seemed very
cozy and habitable in its shabbiness; like the rest of the house it had
an ample supply of furniture, and especially of those trifling articles,
useful or useless, which collect only by slow degrees, and which are a
proof of long humanizing habitation. In that room Sarah Gailey was
indeed merely the successor of the regretted Mrs. Granville, the
landlady who had mysteriously receded into the unknown before the advent
of Sarah and Hilda, but with whom George Cannon must have had many
interviews. No doubt the room was an epitome of the character of Mrs.
Granville, presumably a fussy and precise celibate, with a place for
everything and everything in its place, and an indiscriminating tendency
to hoard.

Sarah Gailey was at that stage of unpacking when, trunks being nearly
empty and drawers having scarcely begun to fill, bed, table, and chairs
are encumbered with confused masses of goods apparently far exceeding
the cubical contents of the trunks.

"Can I do anything for you?" asked Hilda.

The new landlady raised her watery and dejected eyes. "If you wouldn't
mind taking every single one of those knick-knacks off the mantelpiece
and putting them away on the top shelf of the cupboard--"

Hilda smiled. "It's a bit crowded, isn't it?"

"Crowded!" By her intonat