?"

Hilda nodded.

"But what about Master Edwin?" Janet asked, trying to be gay.

"I shan't be able to go," said Hilda carelessly, at the door. "It's of
no consequence."

"Martha has to go down town. If you like, she could call in there, and
just tell him."

It was a reproof, from the young woman who always so thoughtfully
studied the feelings of everybody.

"I'll just write a little note, then, thanks!" Hilda returned calmly,
triumphing after all over Janet's superiority, and thinking, "Janet can
be very peculiar, Janet can!"

III

For more than twenty hours, Hilda was profoundly miserable. Towards the
evening of the same day, she had made herself quite sure that Edwin
Clayhanger would call that night. Her hope persisted until half-past
nine: it then began to fade, and, at ten o'clock, was extinct. His name
had been mentioned by nobody. She went to bed. Having now a room of her
own, which overlooked the Clayhanger garden and house, she gazed forth,
and, in the dark, beheld, with the most anxious sensations, the building
in which Edwin existed and was concealed. "He is there," she said. "He
is active about something at this very instant--perhaps he is reading.
He is close by. If I shouted, he might hear...." And yet she was utterly
cut off from him. Again, in the late dawn, she saw the same building,
pale and clear, but just as secretive and enigmatic as in the night. "He
is asleep yet," she thought. "Why did he not call? Is he hurt? Is he
proud?"

She despaired, because she could devise no means of resuming
communication with him.

Immediately after dinner on the next day, she went with Janet to Janet's
room, to examine a new winter cloak which had been delivered. And, while
Janet was trying it on, and posing coquettishly and yet without
affectation in front of the glass, and while Hilda was reflecting
jealously, "Why am I not like her? I know infinitely more than she
knows. I am a woman, and she is a girl, and yet she seems far more a
woman than I--" Alicia, contrary to all rules, took the room by storm.
Alicia's excuse and salvation lay in a telegram, which she held in her
hand.

"For you, Hilda!" cried the child, excited. "I'm just off to school."

Hilda reached to take the offered telegram, but her hand wavered around
it instead of seizing it. Her eye fastened on a circular portion of the
wall-paper pattern, and she felt that the whole room was revolving about
her. Then she saw Janet's face trans