any other than Wark, it
would have been easy to believe it merely the prelude to complaint of a
fellow-servant or plea for a rise in wages. But if Wark objected to a
fellow-servant, her own view of the matter had always been that the
other one should go. Her mistress knew quite well that in the mouth of
the woman standing there with red eyes at the foot of the bed, such an
announcement as had just been made, meant more. And the consciousness
seemed to bring with it a sense of acute discomfort not unmixed with
anger. For there was a threat of something worse than an infliction of
mere inconvenience. It was a species of desertion. It was almost
treachery. They had lived together all the younger woman's life, except
for those two years that followed on the girl's attempt to make a
conventional servant out of a creature who couldn't be that, but who had
it in her to be more.

They had been too long together for Wark not to divine
something--through all the lady's self-possession--of her sense of being
abandoned.

'It's having to tell you that that kept me awake.'

The wave of dull colour that mounted up to the bushy, straw-coloured
eyebrows seemed on the way to have overflowed into her eyes. They grew
redder than before, and slowly they filled.

'You don't like living here in this house.' Vida caught at the old
complication.

'I've got used to it,' the woman said baldly. Then, after a little
pause, during which she made a barely audible rasping to clear her
throat, 'I don't like leaving you, miss. I always remember how, that
time before--the only time I was ever away from you since you was a
baby--how different I found you when I came back.'

'Different, Wark?'

'Yes, miss. It seemed like you'd turned into somebody else.'

'Most people change--develope--in those years just before twenty.'

'Not like you did, miss. You gave me a deal of trouble when you was
little, but it nearly broke my heart to come back and find you so
quieted down and wise-like.'

A flash of tears glimmered in the mistress's eyes, though her lips were
smiling.

'Of course,' the maid went on, 'though you never told me about it, I
know you had things to bear while I was away, or else you wouldn't have
gone away from your home that time--a mere child--and tried to teach for
a living.'

'It _was_ absurd of me! But whosever fault it was, it wasn't yours.'

'Yes, miss, in a way it was. I owed it to your mother not to have left
you. I've neve