mbered the cabman's somewhat blunt
description and smiled at the memory. A Home for Working Girls. That was
why it had seemed so silent and deserted before, shops and offices do
not shut till after six. But now the workers were coming home, she could
hear their feet along the passages, the slamming of doors, voices and
laughter from the room next hers. Home! This narrow, cold room, those
endless stairs and passages outside, they were to be home for the
future. The hot tears pricked in her eyes, but she fought against tears.
After all, she had been very lucky to find it, it was cheap, it was
clean; other girls lived here and were happy, someone had laughed next
door.

"I have got to take you firmly in hand," Joan argued with her
depression. "It is no use making a fuss about things that are all my own
fault. I tried to play with life and I did not succeed. It is too big
and hard. If I had wanted to work it out differently I ought to have
been very strong. But I am not strong, I am only just ordinary. This is
my chance again, and in the plain, straight way I must win through." She
spoke the words almost aloud, as if challenging fate: "I will win
through."

CHAPTER XI

"Will my strength last me? Did not someone say
The way was ever easier all the way?"

H. C. BEECHING.

Youth can nearly always rely upon sleep to build up new strength, new
hope, new courage. If you have got to a stage in your life when sleep
fails you, if night means merely a long tortured pause from the noises
of the world, in which the beating of your heart seems unbearably loud,
then indeed you have reached to the uttermost edge of despair. Joan
slept, heavily and dreamlessly, save that there was some vague hint of
happiness in her mind, till she was wakened in the morning by a most
violent bell ringing. The dressing-bell at Shamrock House, which went at
seven o'clock, was carried by a maid up and down every passage, so that
there was not the slightest chance of anyone oversleeping themselves.

Joan dressed quickly; the faint aroma of happiness which her sleep had
brought her, and which amounted to cheerfulness, stayed with her. She
remembered how Miss Abercrombie had once said to her: "Oh, you are a
Browningite," and smiled at the phrase, repeating to herself another
verse of the same poem:

"And I shall thereupon
Take rest ere I be gone,
Once more on my adventure brave