so sure of him and of his fineness and of the future, that she
could scarcely bear her felicity. It was too intense.... At last her
life was settled and mapped out. Destiny had been kind, and she meant to
be worthy of her fate. She could have swooned, so intoxicant was her
wonder and her solemn joy and her yearning after righteousness in love.

CHAPTER VI
MISCHANCE

I

Twelve days later, in the evening, Hilda stood by the bedside of Sarah
Gailey in the basement room of No. 59 Preston Street. There was a bright
fire in the grate, and in front of the fire a middle-aged doctor was
cleansing the instrument which he had just employed to inject morphia
into Sarah's exhausted body. Hilda's assumption that the ageing woman
had telegraphed for her on inadequate grounds had proved to be quite
wrong.

Upon entering the house on that Thursday night, Hilda, despite the
anxious pale face of the new servant who had waited up for her and who
entreated her to see Sarah Gailey instantly, had gone first to her own
room and scrawled passionately a note to Edwin, which ran: "DEAREST,--
This is my address. I love you. Every bit of me is absolutely yours.
Write me.--H. L." She gave the letter to the servant to post at once.
And as she gave it she had a vision of it travelling in post office,
railway vans, and being sorted, and sealed up in a bag, and recovered
from the bag, and scanned by the postman at Bursley, and borne up
Trafalgar Road by the postman, and dropped into the letter-box at
Edwin's house, and finally seized by Edwin; and of it pleasing him
intensely,--for it was a good letter, and she was proud of it because
she knew that it was characteristic.

And then, with her mind freed, she had opened the door of Sarah's
bedroom. Sarah was unquestionably very ill. Sarah had been quite right
in telegraphing so peremptorily to Hilda; and if she had not so
telegraphed she would have been quite wrong. On the previous day she had
been sitting on the cold new oilcloth of the topmost stairs, minutely
instructing a maid in the craft of polishing banisters. And the next
morning an attack of acute sciatica had supervened. For a trifling
indiscretion Sarah was thus condemned to extreme physical torture. Hilda
had found her rigid on the bed. She suffered the severest pain in the
small of the back and all down the left leg. Her left knee was supported
on pillows, and the bed-clothes were raised away from it, for it could
tolerate no we