Then came a solicitous exhibition of filial affection on the part
of Gay, and at last, to Molly's relief, they arrived at the new,
brilliantly lighted hotel, and were led through stifling corridors,
carpeted in red, to their rooms on the second floor in the front of the
building. As she passed over the velvet carpets, Molly had again the
sensation that she was walking over ploughed ground; and when she had
escaped from Mrs. Gay's sitting-room, on the pretext of dressing
for dinner, she threw open the window, and leaned out of the close
atmosphere into the freshness of the November evening. This was what she
had once looked upon as pleasure--or at least as exciting amusement--to
move continually from one hot and over furnished hotel to another, to
fuss about missing packages, to see crowds of strange faces passing
before her, all fat and overfed and all, somehow, looking exactly alike.

A wave of homesickness for the white roads and the golden broomsedge
of Old Church swept over her. She wanted the open fields, and more than
all, far more than all, she wanted Abel! It was her fault--she had made
her choice--no one else was to blame for it. And, then, though she had
made her choice and no one else was to blame for it, she felt that she
almost hated old Mr. Jonathan, as she still called him in her thoughts,
because he had left her his money. At the bottom of her heart, there
was the perfectly unreasonable suspicion that he had arranged the whole
thing out of spite.

In the sitting-room, meanwhile, which Kesiah's bedroom separated from
Molly's, Mrs. Gay was lying on a couch beside a table on which stood a
cut-glass bowl of purple orchids sent to her by her son. She was looking
a little pale, but this pallor was not unbecoming since it enhanced the
expression of appealing melancholy in her eyes. To look at her was to
recognize that life had crushed her, and yet that her soul exhaled an
intense sweetness in the midst of its suffering.

Jonathan had just gone down to buy the evening papers; in the next room
she could hear Kesiah at the unpacking; so she was left for a moment
alone with her imagination. The fatigue of the trip had affected her
nerves, and she sank, while she lay there in her travelling gown,
which she had not yet removed, into one of those spells of spiritual
discontent which followed inevitably any unusual physical discomfort.
She thought, not resentfully but sadly, that Kesiah managed to grow even
more o