reet,
walking leisurely by the sea-wall, alone. If Mr. Boutwood had had a more
generous and wild disposition he might have allowed Florrie to ruin him
in six months of furs and carriages and champagne. But Mr. Boutwood,
though a dog, was a careful dog, especially at those moments when the
conventional dog can refuse nothing. Florrie was well and warmly
dressed,--no more; and she was on foot. Hilda's gaze fastened on her,
and immediately divined from the cut and fall of the coat that Florrie
had something to conceal from every one but her Mr. Boutwood. And
whereas Florrie trod the pavement with a charming little air that
wavered between impudence and modesty, between timid meekness and
conceit, Hilda blushed with shame and pity. She on one footpath and
Florrie on the other!

"Soon," she thought, "I shall not be able to walk along this road!"

She had sinned. She admitted that she had sinned against some quality in
herself. But how innocently and how ignorantly! And what a tremendous
punishment for so transient a weakness! And new consequences, still more
disastrous than any she had foreseen, presented themselves one after
another. George had escaped, but a word of open scandal, a single
whisper in the ear of the old creature down at Torquay, might actuate
machinery that would reach out after him and drag him back, and plant
him in jail. George, the father of her child, in jail! It was all a
matter of chance; sheer chance! She began to perceive what life really
was, and the immense importance of hazard therein. Nevertheless, without
frailty, without defection, what could chance have done? She began to
perceive that this that she was living through was life. She bit her
lips. Grief! Shame! Disillusion! Hardship! Peril! Catastrophe! Exile!
Above all, exile! These had to be faced, and they would be faced. She
recalled the firiest verse of Crashaw and she set her shoulders back.
There was the stuff of a woman in her.... Only a little while, and she
had seen before her a beloved boy entranced by her charm. She had now no
charm. Where now was the soft virgin?... And yet, somehow, magically,
miraculously, the soft virgin was still there! And the invincible vague
hope of youth, and the irrepressible consciousness of power, were almost
ready to flame up afresh, contrary to all reason, and irradiate her
starless soul.

NOTE:--_The later history of Hilda Lessways and Edwin Clayhanger will
form the theme of another novel._