ed it, one
fancies, with less sanguine anticipations for herself: but the black
disaster that rode on with it brought her certain aids to the spirit,
certain hopes of herself. Laura's prompt replies, with their terrible
margins and painstaking solecisms, came to be things Miss Livingstone
looked forward to. She read them with a beating heart, however, in the
unconscious apprehension of some revelation of improvement. She was
quite unaware of it, but she entertained towards the Simpsons an
attitude of misgiving in this regard.

Hilda went on about her business. As usual her business was important
and imperative; nothing was lightened for her this last day. She drove
about from place to place in the hot, slatternly city, putting more than
her usual vigour and directness into all she did. It seemed to her that
the sunlight burning on the tiles, pouring through the crowded streets,
had more than ever a vivid note; and so much spoke to her, came to her,
from the profuse and ingenuous life which streamed about her, that she
leaned a little forward to meet it with happy eyes and tender lips that
said, "I know. I see." She was living for the moment which should exhale
itself somewhere about midnight after the lights had gone out on her
last appearance--living for it as a Carmelite might live for the climax
of her veil and her vows if it were conceivable that beyond the cell
and the grating she saw the movement and the colour and the passion of
a wider life. All Hilda's splendid vitality went into her intention,
of which she was altogether mistress, riding it and reining it in a
straight course through the encumbered hours. It keyed her to a finer
and more eager susceptibility; and the things she saw stayed with her,
passing into a composite day which the years were hardly to dim for her.

She could live like that, for the purposes of a period, wrought up to
immense keenness of sense and brilliancy of energy, making steadily for
some point of feeling or achievement flashing gloriously on the horizon.
It is already plain, perhaps, that she rejoiced in such strokes, and
that life as she found it worth living was marked by a succession of
them.

She had kept, even from Lindsay, what she meant to do. When she stepped
from his brougham, flushed after the indubitable triumph of the evening,
with her arms full of real bouquets from Chatterjee's--no eight-anna
bazar confections edged with silver tinsel--it occurred to her that this
r