nce and a danger. Then had come the bitter
toil for a pittance, and sickness, and the hospital, and the long
period of convalescence during which everything but the ring had been
swept away. She had met the sharp tongues of slatternly, disappointed
landladies, while she looked far and wide for work. At first she had
been compelled to ask girls on the street for the meaning of cards
pasted on windows or hanging in doorways. Words such as "Bushel girls
on pants" or "Stockroom assistants" had signified nothing to her.
Month by month she had worked in shops and factories where the work
she exacted from her ill-nourished body sapped her strength and
thinned her blood. Nor could she compete with many of the girls,
brought up to such labor, smart, pushing, inured to an existence
carried on with the minimum of food and respirable air.

The red came to her cheeks again as she remembered insults that had
been proffered to her. It deepened further as she thought of that
paper picked up on a bench of a little city square. The fear of having
made a terrible mistake returned to her, more strongly than ever. Her
efforts towards peace now seemed immodest, bold, unwomanly. But that
first vision had been so keen of a quiet-voiced man extending a strong
hand to welcome and protect as he smiled at her in pleasant greeting!
Her vague notions of a far country in which was no wilderness of brick
and mortar but only the beauty of smiling fields or of scented forests
had filled her heart with a passionate longing. And the last thing the
doctor had told her, in the hospital, was that she ought to live far
away from the city, in the pure air of God's country. It was with a
hot face and a throbbing heart that she now remembered the poor little
letters she had written. Even the sending of that telegram now filled
her with shame. And yet....

With clamorous voice the man was announcing her train. After a
heart-rending moment's hesitation she hastened to where a few people
were waiting. The gates opened and she was pushed along. It was as if
her own will could no longer lead her, as if she were being carried by
a strong tide, with other jetsam, towards shores unknown.

At last she was seated in an ordinary coach, than which man has never
devised sorrier accommodation for a long journey. Finally the train
started and she sought to look out of the window but obtained only a
blurred impression of columns and pillars lighted at intervals by
flickering