ated that Florrie was in the kennel.

They went together to the drawing-room on the first floor. It was,
empty, the entire population of the boarding-houses being still on the
seashore. Hilda stood near the door, which she left open, and gave
detailed news of Florrie in a tone very matter-of-fact. There was no
reference to love, or to the new situation created, or to the vast
enterprise of the Chichester. The topic was Florrie, and somehow it held
the field despite efforts to dislodge it.

Then the stairs creaked. Already Florrie was coming down. In a trice she
had made herself ready for work. She came down timidly, not daring to
look to right nor left, but concentrating her attention on the stairs.
She passed along the landing outside the drawing-room door, and Hilda,
opening the door a little wider, had a full surreptitious view of her
back; and George Cannon, farther within the room, also saw her. They
watched her disappear on her way to find the basement and the formidable
Sarah Gailey. Hilda was touched by the spectacle of this child disguised
as a strapping woman, far removed from her family and her companions and
her familiar haunts, and driven or drawn into exile at Brighton, where
she would only see the sea once a week, except through windows, and
where she would have to work from fourteen to sixteen hours a day for a
living, and sleep in a kennel. The prettiness, the pertness, and the
naive contentedness of the child thus realizing an ambition touched her
deeply.

"It does seem a shame, doesn't it?" she said.

"What?"

"Bringing her all the way up here, like this! She doesn't know a soul in
Brighton. She's bound to be frightfully home-sick--"

"What about you?" George Cannon interrupted politely. "Doesn't she know
you?" He smiled with all his kindness.

"Yes--but--"

Hilda did not finish. It was not worth while. George Cannon had not
understood. He did not feel as she felt, and her emotion was
incommunicable to him. A tremendous misgiving seized her, and she had a
physical feeling of emptiness in the stomach. It passed, swiftly as a
hallucination. Just such a misgiving as visits nearly every normal
person immediately before or immediately after marriage! She ignored it.
She was engaged--that was the paramount fact! She was engaged, and
joyously determined to prosecute the grand adventure to the end. The
immensity of the risks forced her to accept them.

IV

That evening Sarah Gailey was in torme