er, 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 and
scents and colours, from music and art, from dancing, flowers, and all
that made life beautiful? The secret forces of fastidiousness, an inborn
dread of the fanatical, and all her real ignorance of what such a life
was like, rose in Cecilia with a