mpanies inspiration kept her up;
but afterwards she had a stinging fit of remorse; and her
self-reproaches were every whit as bitter as those of the man who has
again broken the moral law he has vowed to respect, and who now sees
that he is powerless against recurring temptation.

When she remembered those four rapacious faces, Laura realised that,
come what might, she would never have the courage to confess. To them,
at least. That night in deep humility she laid her sin bare to God,
imploring Him, even though He could not pardon it, to avert the
consequences from her.

The last days were also darkened by her belief that M. P. had got wind
of her romancings: as, indeed, was quite likely; for the girls' tongues
were none too safe. Mary looked at her from time to time with such a
sternly suspicious eye that Laura's very stomach quailed within her.

And meanwhile the generous hours had declined to less than half.

"Twice more to get up, and twice to go to bed," she reckoned aloud to
herself on Saturday morning.

She was spending that week-end at Godmother's. It was as dull as usual;
she had ample leisure to brood over what lay before her. It was now a
certainty, fixed, immovable; for, by leaving school that day without
having spoken, she had burned her ships behind her. When she went back
on Monday M. P. would be there, and every loophole closed. On Sunday
evening she made an excuse and went down into the garden. There was no
moon; but, overhead, the indigo-blue was a prodigal glitter of
stars--myriads of silver eyes that perforated the sky. They sparkled
with a cold disregard of the small girl standing under the mulberry
tree; but Laura, too, was only half-alive to their magnificence. Her
thoughts ran on suicide, on making an end of her blighted career. God
was evidently not going to be generous or long-suffering enough to come
to her aid; and in imagination she saw the fifty-five gaining on her
like a pack of howling hyaenas; saw Mrs. Gurley, Mr. Strachey--Mother.
Detection and exposure, she knew it now, were the most awful things the
world held. But she had nothing handy: neither a rope, nor poison, nor
was there a dam in the neighbourhood.

That night she had the familiar dream that she was being "stood up" and
expelled, as Annie Johns had been: thousands of tongues shouted her
guilt; she was hunted like a wallaby. She wakened with a scream, and
Marina, her bedfellow, rose on one elbow and lighted the candle.
C