see what can be done. Of
course it would never do for you to have any difficulty with your
mother."

"Oh no!" she concurred vehemently. "Anything would be better than that.
But I thought there was no harm in me--"

"Certainly not."

She had a profound confidence in him. And she was very content so far
with the result of her adventure.

"I hope nobody will find out I've been here," she said timidly. "Because
if it _did_ get to mother's ears--"

"Nobody will find out," he reassured her.

Assuredly his influence was tranquillizing. Even while he insisted on
the difficulties of the situation, he seemed to be smoothing them away.
She was convinced that he would devise some means of changing her
mother's absurd purpose and of strengthening her own position. But when,
at the end of the interview, he came round the large table which
separated them, and she rose and looked up at him, close, she was
suddenly very afraid of him. He was a tall and muscular man, and he
stood like a monarch, and she stood like a child. And his gesture seemed
to say: "Yes, I know you are afraid. And I rather like you to be afraid.
But I am benevolent in the exercise of my power." Under his gaze, her
gaze fastened on the wire-blind and the dark window, and she read off
the reversed letters on the blind.

Like a mouse she escaped to the stairs. She was happy and fearful and
expectant.... It was done! She had consulted a lawyer! She was astounded
at herself.

In the Market Square it was now black night. She looked shyly up at the
lighted wire-blinds over the ironmongery. "I was there!" she said. "He
is still there." The whole town, the whole future, seemed to be drenched
now in romance. Nevertheless, the causes of her immense discontent had
not apparently been removed nor in any way modified.

CHAPTER IV
DOMESTICITY INVADED

I

Early in the afternoon, two days later, Hilda came, with an air of
reproach, into her mother's empty bedroom. Mrs. Lessways had contracted
a severe cold in the head, a malady to which she was subject and which
she accepted with fatalistic submission, even pleasurably giving herself
up to it, as a martyr to the rack. Mrs. Lessways' colds annoyed Hilda,
who out of her wisdom could always point to the precise indiscretion
which had caused them, and to whom the spectacle of a head wrapped day
and night in flannel was offensively ridiculous. Moreover, Hilda in
these crises was further and still more acutely exas