... Nothing to worry about."

For some while he sat there, Martin's hand in his; Martin did not know
whether he were asleep or not.

At about ten he ate and drank. At eleven he started with Amy and
Thurston for the Chapel.

CHAPTER XI

THE CHARIOT OF FIRE

When Jane, scolded by Aunt Anne for an untidy appearance, gave notice
and at once departed, Maggie felt as though the ground was giving way
under her feet.

A week until the New Year, and no opportunity of hearing from Martin
during that time. Then she laughed at herself:

"You're losing your sense of proportion, my dear, over this. Laugh at
yourself. What's a week?"

She did laugh at herself, but she had not very much to base her
laughter upon. Martin's last letters had been short and very uneasy.
She had already, in a surprising fashion for one so young, acquired a
very wise and just estimate of Martin's character.

"He's only a boy," she used to say to herself and feel his elder by at
least twenty years. Nevertheless the thought of his struggling on there
alone was not a happy one. She longed, even though she might not advise
him, to comfort him. She was beginning to realise something of her own
power over him and to see, too, the strange mixture of superstition and
self-reproach and self-distrust that overwhelmed him when she was not
with him. She had indeed her own need of struggle against superstition.
Her aunts continued to treat her with a quiet distant severity. Aunt
Elizabeth, she fancied, would like to have been kind to her, but she
was entirely under the influence of her sister, and there, too, Maggie
was generous enough to see that Aunt Anne behaved as she did rather
from a stern sense of duty than any real unkindness. Aunt Anne could
not feel unkindly; she was too far removed from human temper and
discontent and weakness. Nevertheless she had been deeply shocked at
the revelation of Maggie's bad behaviour, and it was a shock from
which, in all probability she would never recover.

"WE'LL never be friends again." Maggie thought, watching her aunt's
austere composure from the other side of the dining-table. She was sad
at the thought of that, remembering moments--that first visit to St.
Dreot's, the departure in the cab, the night when she had sat at her
aunt's bedside--that had given glimpses of the kind human creature Aunt
Anne might have been had she never heard of the Inside Saints.

Maggie, during these last days, did everything