ight whatever. The doctor, who had been and gone, had
arranged a system of fomentation and hot-water bottles surpassing
anything in even Sarah's experience. And there Sarah lay, not feverish
but sweating with agony, terrified to move, terrified to take a deep
breath, lest the disturbance of the muscles might produce consequences
beyond her strength to endure. She was in no danger of death. She could
talk. She could eat and drink. Her pulse was scarcely quickened. But she
was degraded and humiliated by mere physical anguish to the condition of
a brute. This was her lot in life. All through that first night Hilda
stayed with her, trying to pretend that Sarah was a woman, and in the
morning she had assumed control of the house.

She had her secret to console her. It remained a secret because there
was no one to whom she could relate it. Sarah had no ear for news
unconnected with her malady. And indeed to tell Sarah, as Sarah was,
would have been to carry callousness to the point of insult. And so
Hilda, amid her enormous labours and fatigue, had lived with her secret,
which, from being a perfumed delight, turned in two days to something
subtly horrible, to something that by its horror prevented her from
writing to Edwin aught but the briefest missives. She had existed from
hour to hour, from one minute apprehensively to the next, day and night,
hardly sleeping, devoured inwardly by a fear at once monstrous and
simple, at once convincing and incredible. As for the letter which
mentally she had composed a hundred times to Edwin, and which she owed
to him, it had become fantastic and then inconceivable to her.

II

One of the new servants entered the room and handed a letter to Hilda,
and left the room and shut the door. The envelope was addressed "Miss
Lessways, 59 Preston Street, Brighton," in Edwin Clayhanger's beautiful
handwriting. Every evening came thus a letter, which he had posted in
Bursley on the previous day. Hilda thought: "Will this contain another
reproach at my irregularity? I can't bear it, if it does." And she gazed
at the handwriting, and in particular at her own name, and her own name
seemed to be the name of somebody else, of some strange young woman. She
felt dizzy.... The door of Sarah's wardrobe was ajar, and, in the mirror
of it, Hilda could see herself obscurely, a black-robed strange young
woman, with untidy hair and white cheeks and huge, dark, staring heavy
eyes, with pouches beneath them. The