, which stood
over six feet high and had to be wound up every night by hauling on a
rope, was noisily getting ready to strike two. But for Mrs. Lessways'
disorderly and undesired assistance, Hilda's task might have been
finished a quarter of an hour earlier. She passed quietly up the stairs.
When she was near the top, her mother's voice, at once querulous and
amiable, came from the sitting-room:

"Where are you going to?"

There was a pause, dramatic for both of them, and in that minute pause
the very life of the house seemed for an instant to be suspended, and
then the waves of the hostile love that united these two women resumed
their beating, and Hilda's lips hardened.

"Upstairs," she answered callously.

No reply from the sitting-room!

At two o'clock on the last Wednesday of every month, old Mr. Skellorn,
employed by Mrs. Lessways to collect her cottage-rents, called with a
statement of account, and cash in a linen bag. He was now due. During
his previous visit Hilda had sought to instil some common sense into her
mother on the subject of repairs, and there had ensued an altercation
which had never been settled.

"If I stayed down, she wouldn't like it," Hilda complained fiercely
within herself, "and if I keep away she doesn't like that either! That's
mother all over!"

She went to her bedroom. And into the soft, controlled shutting of the
door she put more exasperated vehemence than would have sufficed to bang
it off its hinges.

II

At this date, late October in 1878, Hilda was within a few weeks of
twenty-one. She was a woman, but she could not realize that she was a
woman. She remembered that when she first went to school, at the age of
eight, an assistant teacher aged nineteen had seemed to her to be
unquestionably and absolutely a woman, had seemed to belong definitely
to a previous generation. The years had passed, and Hilda was now older
than that mature woman was then; and yet she could not feel adult,
though her childhood gleamed dimly afar off, and though the intervening
expanse of ten years stretched out like a hundred years, like eternity.
She was in trouble; the trouble grew daily more and more tragic; and the
trouble was that she wanted she knew not what. If her mother had said to
her squarely, "Tell me what it is will make you a bit more contented,
and you shall have it even if it kills me!" Hilda could only have
answered with the fervour of despair, "I don't know! I don't know!"

H