long time sat listening with a queer twisted smile to
the moanings of her lost illusions.

The dawn found them still sitting there against the bole of the
beech-tree. Her lips were parted; the tears had dried on her sleeping
face, pillowed against his shoulder, while he still watched her sideways
with the ghost of that twisted smile.

And beyond the grey water, like some tired wanton, the moon in an orange
hood was stealing down to her rest between the trees.

CHAPTER XXXVI

STEPHEN SIGNS CHEQUES

Cecilia received the mystic document containing these words "Am quite
all right. Address, 598, Euston Road, three doors off Martin. Letter
follows explaining. Thyme," she had not even realised her little
daughter's departure. She went up to Thyme's room at once, and opening
all the drawers and cupboards, stared into them one by one. The many
things she saw there allayed the first pangs of her disquiet.

'She has only taken one little trunk,' she thought, 'and left all her
evening frocks.'

This act of independence alarmed rather than surprised her, such had
been her sense of the unrest in the domestic atmosphere during the last
month. Since the evening when she had found Thyme in foods of tears
because of the Hughs' baby, her maternal eyes had not failed to notice
something new in the child's demeanour--a moodiness, an air almost of
conspiracy, together with an emphatic increase of youthful sarcasm:
Fearful of probing deep, she had sought no confidence, nor had she
divulged her doubts to Stephen.

Amongst the blouses a sheet of blue ruled paper, which had evidently
escaped from a notebook, caught her eye. Sentences were scrawled on it
in pencil. Cecilia read: "That poor little dead thing was so grey and
pinched, and I seemed to realise all of a sudden how awful it is for
them. I must--I must--I will do something!"

Cecilia dropped the sheet of paper; her hand was trembling. There was no
mystery in that departure now, and Stephen's words came into her mind:
"It's all very well up to a certain point, and nobody sympathises
with them more than I do; but after that it becomes destructive of all
comfort, and that does no good to anyone."

The sound sense of those words had made her feel queer when they were
spoken; they were even more sensible than she had thought. Did her
little daughter, so young and pretty, seriously mean to plunge into the
rescue work of dismal slums, to cut herself adrift from sweet sounds an