had changed the current of her life!

CHAPTER IX

WYLIE STREET

There was a little spindle-supported porch before Honora's front door,
and had she chosen she might have followed the example of her neighbours
and sat there in the evenings. She preferred to watch the life about her
from the window-seat in the little parlour. The word exile suggests,
perhaps, to those who have never tried it, empty wastes, isolation,
loneliness. She had been prepared for these things, and Wylie Street was
a shock to her: in sending her there at this crisis in her life fate had
perpetrated nothing less than a huge practical joke. Next door, for
instance, in the twin house to hers, flaunted in the face of liberal
divorce laws, was a young couple with five children. Honora counted them,
from the eldest ones that ran over her little grass plot on their way to
and from the public school, to the youngest that spent much of his time
gazing skyward from a perambulator on the sidewalk. Six days of the week,
about six o'clock in the evening, there was a celebration in the family.
Father came home from work! He was a smooth-faced young man whom a
fortnight in the woods might have helped wonderfully--a clerk in the big
department store.

He radiated happiness. When opposite Honora's front door he would open
his arms--the signal for a race across her lawn. Sometimes it was the
little girl, with pigtails the colour of pulled molasses candy, who won
the prize of the first kiss: again it was her brother, a year her junior;
and when he was raised it was seen that the seat of his trousers was
obviously double. But each of the five received a reward, and the baby
was invariably lifted out of the perambulator. And finally there was a
conjugal kiss on the spindled porch.

The wife was a roly-poly little body. In the mornings, at the side
windows, Honora heard her singing as she worked, and sometimes the sun
struck with a blinding flash the pan she was in the act of shining. And
one day she looked up and nodded and smiled. Strange indeed was the
effect upon our heroine of that greeting! It amazed Honora herself. A
strange current ran through her and left her hot, and even as she smiled
and nodded back, unbidden tears rose scalding to her eyes. What was it?
Why was it?

She went downstairs to the little bookcase, filled now with volumes that
were not trash. For Hugh's sake, she would try to improve herself this
winter by reading serious things. But