r body and caught sight of Hilda, Florrie blushed.

The stairs were blocked by the trunk which Hilda had left on the
stair-mat for the cabman to deal with. Standing behind the trunk, Hilda
held forth her hand for the letter.

"Please, miss, it's for me," Florrie whispered, like a criminal.

"For you?" Hilda cried, startled.

In proof Florrie timidly exposed the envelope, on which Hilda plainly
saw, in a coarse, scrawling masculine hand, the words "Miss Florrie
Bagster." Florrie's face was a burning peony.

Hilda turned superciliously away, too proud to demand any explanations.
All her alarms were refreshed by the failure of a letter from Miss
Gailey. In vain she urged to herself that Miss Gailey had thought it
unnecessary to write, expecting to see her; or that the illness having
passed, Miss Gailey, busy, had put off writing. She could not dismiss a
vision of a boarding-house in London upset from top to bottom by the
grave illness of one person in it, and a distracted landlady who had not
a moment even to scribble a post card. And all the time, as this vision
tore and desolated her, she was thinking: "Fancy that child having a
follower, at her age! She's certainly got a follower!"

The cab came five minutes before it was due.

III

As the cab rolled through Market Square, where the Saturday stalls were
being busily set up, the ironmongery building was framed for an instant
by the oblong of the rattling window. Hilda seemed to see the place
anew--for the first time. A man was taking down the shutters of the
shop. Above that were the wire-blinds with the name of "Q. Karkeek"; and
above the blinds the blue posters of the _Five Towns Chronicle_. No
outward sign of Mr. Cannon! And yet Mr. Cannon.... She had an extremely
disconcerting sensation of the mysteriousness of Mr. Cannon, and of the
mysteriousness of all existence. Mr. Cannon existed somewhere at that
moment, engaged in some activity. In a house afar off, unknown to her,
her mother existed--if she was not dead! Florrie, with a bundle of
personal goods on her lap, and doubtless the letter in her bosom, sat
impressed and subdued, opposite to her in the shifting universe of the
cab, which was moving away from the empty and silent home. Florrie was
being thrown back out of luxury into her original hovel, and was
accepting the stroke with the fatalism of the young and of the poor. And
one day Hilda and her mother and Florrie would be united again in the
home n