oom,
always sitting down on her bed "to take a breath" and to get a full
gaze at the crucifix of bright yellow wood, that hung just under her
mother's picture. Tramp, tramp, tramp round the house she went.

It was incredible how deeply Maggie had interfered with this ritual.
She had certainly not intended to do so. After that first effort to
change certain things in the house she had retired from the battle, had
completely capitulated. Nevertheless she had interfered with all
Grace's movements and, as the terror of her grew, it seemed to pervade
every nook and corner of the house, so that Grace felt that she could
go nowhere without that invasion. Oh, how she resented it, and how
afraid she was! After Paul and Maggie returned from that summer holiday
she saw that Paul too felt Maggie's strangeness. To Grace, from the
beginning of that autumn, every movement and gesture of Maggie's was
strange. The oddity of her appearance, her ignorance of everything that
seemed to Grace to be life, her strange, half-mocking, half-wondering
attitude to the Church and its affairs ("like a heathen in Central
Africa"), her dislike of the Maxses and the Pynsents and her liking for
the Toms and Caroline Purdie, her odd silences and still odder
speeches, all these things increased the atmosphere that separated her
from the rest of the world.

Then came the day when Grace, dusting in Maggie's bedroom, discovered
the bundle of letters. She read them, read them with shame at her own
dishonesty and anger at Maggie for making her dishonest. To her virgin
ignorance the passion in them spoke of illicit love and the grossest
immorality. Her heart burnt with a strange mingling of envy, jealousy,
loneliness, shame, and eagerness to know more ...

Then came Uncle Mathew's visit; then Caroline Purdie's disgrace. The
count was fully charged. Maggie, that strange girl found in the heart
of London's darkness, alone, without friends or parents, was a witch, a
devilish, potion-dealing witch, who might, at any time, fly through the
night-sky on a broom-stick as surely as any mediaeval old hag. These
visions might be exaggerated for many human beings, not so for Grace.
Having no imagination she was soaked in superstition. She clung to a
few simple pictures, and was exposed to every terror that those
pictures could supply.

Maggie now haunted her day and night. Everywhere she could feel
Maggie's eyes piercing her. A thousand times an hour she looked up to
s