k me all of a sudden!... You've not seen her since you
came in?"

He shook his head. "I thought I'd better keep out of the way. I thought
I'd better leave it all to you. It's appalling, simply appalling!...
Just when everything was shaping so well!"

Hilda thought, bewildered: 'Shaping so well?' With her glance she took
in the little cheerless bedroom, and herself and George Cannon within
it, overwhelmed. In imagination she saw all the other bedrooms, dark,
forlorn, and inanimate, waiting through long nights and empty days until
some human creature as pathetic as themselves should come and feebly
vitalize them into a spurious transient homeliness; and she saw George
Cannon's bedroom--the harsh bedroom of the bachelor who had never had a
home; and the bedrooms of those fearsome mummies, the Watchetts, each
bed with its grisly face on the pillow in the dark; and the kennels of
the unclean servants; and so, descending through the floors, to Sarah
Gailey's bedroom in the very earth, and the sleepless form on that bed,
beneath the whole! And the organism of the boarding-house seemed
absolutely tragic to her, compact of the stuff of sorrow itself! And yet
George Cannon had said, 'Shaping so well!'

"What's to be done?" he inquired plaintively.

"Nothing that I can see!" she said. She had a tremendous desire to
escape from the responsibility thrust on her by the situation; but she
knew that she could never escape from it; that she was immovably pinned
down by it.

"I can't see anything either," said he, quietly responsive, and speaking
now in a gentle voice. "Supposing I tell her that she can go, and that
I'll make her an allowance? What could she do, then? It would be madness
for her to live alone any more. She's the very last person who ought to
live alone. Moreover, she wouldn't accept the allowance. Well, then, she
must stay with me--here. And if she stays here she must work, otherwise
she'd never stay--not she! And she must be the mistress. She wouldn't
stand having anyone above her, or even equal with her, that's a
certainty! Besides, she's so good at her job. She hasn't got a great
deal of system, so far as I can see, but she can get the work out of the
servants without too much fuss, and she's so mighty economical in her
catering! Of course she can't get on the right side of a boarder--but
then I _can_! And that's the whole point! With me on the spot to _run_
the place, she'd be perfect--perfect! Couldn't wish for