t impractical of people--are they not?
They are surely less harassed than you were?"

("I must have been very sleepy: I don't remember telling her all about
it," thought the woman, "but she seems to know.")

"Yes," she said aloud, "I was harassed. Nearly to death, it seems. I
am hardly myself yet. I suppose you have been through it all?"

"I have been through a great deal, yes."

The shadows deepened and a thin, new moon sank lower and lower. The
grey figure grew less and less distinct to her, and before she knew it,
she slept. When she woke, she was alone on the balcony, and the
sunlight lay in blue-white pools upon the floor. For the first time in
her life she had slept alone under the stars, with no one to settle her
into her dreams or to attend on her when she woke from them, and
suspicion and displeasure darkened for a moment the freshest awakening
she could remember. Had they really forgotten her? No one seemed to
be coming, and after a quarter of an hour's impatient waiting she left
the long, couch-like chair, opened the door of her room and went with
quick determined steps down the narrow hall, down the stairs, straight
to the sounds of women's voices in the distance. They led her through
a shining kitchen, where a patient, old clock presided, through a cool,
dim buttery into a primitive laundry, or washing shed, with deal tubs
and big copper cauldrons and a swept stone floor. But no odour of the
keen cleanliness she had learned to connect with Hester's soap ruled
the wash-house this morning: a breeze from Araby the blest blew through
the piles of dewy crimson strawberries that heaped themselves in yellow
bowls, in silver-tinted pans, in leaf-lined wicker baskets, and brought
all the gardens of June into the bare, stone room. Hester's quick
fingers twisted the delicate hulls from the scarlet, scented globes,
and near her, measuring mounds of glittering sugar, stood a broader,
squarer woman with greying hair, who smiled gravely at her, facing her.

"Here she is, now," said this woman, whom she guessed to be Ann, and
Hester, turning to her, added, as one who finishes a sentence, merely,

"And I was just getting ready a dish of strawberries for you. Mother
has stepped out for your egg: the brown hen has just laid. The rolls
are in the oven and mother has the chocolate ready. I thought you
would be early this morning, you were sleeping so soundly."

"Early? early?" she repeated, taken aback by th