rity that she was not happy. Wise, experienced observers, studying
her as she walked her ways in the streets, might have said of her with
sympathetically sad conviction, "That girl is not happy! What a pity!"
It was so. And yet, in her unhappiness she was blest. She savoured her
unhappiness. She drank it down passionately, as though it were the very
water of life--which it was. She lived to the utmost in every moment.
The recondite romance of existence was not hidden from her. The sudden
creation--her creation--of the link with Mr. Cannon seemed to her
surpassingly strange and romantic; and in so regarding it she had no
ulterior thought whatever: she looked on it with the single-mindedness
of an artist looking on his work. And was it not indeed astounding that
by a swift caprice and stroke of audacity she should have changed and
tranquillized the ominous future for her unsuspecting mother and
herself? Was it not absolutely disconcerting that she and this Mr.
Cannon, whom she had never known before and in whom she had no other
interest, should bear between them this singular secret, at once
innocent and guilty, in the midst of the whole town so deaf and blind?

II

A somewhat shabby-genteel, youngish man appeared at the head of the
stairs; he was wearing a silk hat and a too ample frock-coat. And
immediately, from the hidden corridor at the top, she heard the voice of
Mr. Cannon, imperious:

"Karkeek!"

The shabby-genteel man stopped. Hilda wanted to escape, but she could
not, chiefly because her pride would not allow. She had to go on. She
went on, frowning.

The man vanished back into the corridor. She could hear that Mr. Cannon
had joined him in conversation. She arrived at the corridor.

"How-d'ye-do, Miss Lessways?" Mr. Cannon greeted her with calm
politeness, turning from Mr. Karkeek, who raised his hat. "Will you come
this way? One moment, Mr. Karkeek."

Through a door marked "Private" Mr. Cannon introduced Hilda straight
into his own room; then shut the door on her. He held in one hand a
large calf-bound volume, from which evidently he was expounding
something to Mr. Karkeek. The contrast between the expensive informality
of Mr. Cannon's new suit and the battered ceremoniousness of Mr.
Karkeek's struck her just as much as the contrast between their
demeanours; and she felt, vaguely, the oddness of the fact that the name
of the deferential Mr. Karkeek, and not the name of the commanding Mr.
Cannon, shou