She refused to give him up, and he married her, after taking orders, and entering the Church as a miserably paid curate. Together they settled in the dingy little house near the Church of St. Jude, at Dalston, to prove that love in poverty was a different matter from the same emotion experienced in affluence. Henry Page was not strong enough to bear misfortune well. His temper, naturally irrational and impatient of hardship--a temper which it would have required much material prosperity to soften, became soured and exacting under the stress of daily anxious necessity. Five years after their marriage, his young wife, crushed and saddened, gave up the struggle and died, leaving her two children in no very gentle hands. The boy, determined to call his life his own, had cut the knot of uncongenial family existence by flight. Anne was left. * * * * * Miss Page turned over the leaves of the exercise book slowly. On the whole, the child she remembered had kept her resolution fairly well. “_To-day is my birthday. I am thirteen. I am fifteen. I am seventeen._” The words marking another year met her eyes constantly as she fluttered the pages. Several times there was a mention of Hugh. She had heard from him. He was getting on. He hoped some day to be captain of a trading vessel. He had sent her some funny writing-paper from Japan. Another time it was a pressed flower, or some curious seeds from the South Sea Islands. Once--this was recorded after her seventeenth birthday--he had come home for a week. “He is nineteen, and so brown and handsome and strong,” was the remark in the journal. “He did not get on well with father. He told him that I ought to go away--that I had no friends, and that my life was very dull. Father was terribly angry. Now Hugh has gone, and I’m wretched--_wretched_. The house is so quiet. I can hear the clock in the hall ticking even when I’m upstairs in my bedroom. It is raining, and the sky is like lead.” * * * * * Anne still turned the leaves. There were big gaps in the journal, but if they had been filled, the word across the page would have been the classic _nothing_ of the diary of Louis XVI. In thought Anne went back over the long, dreary years--the incredibly empty years of a woman whom lack of means as well as lack of opportunity cuts off from the world. A woman moreover, whose youth was spent under conditions less elastic, less favourable to development than those of modern days. The cold bare nave of St. Jude’s rose vividly in her mind. She saw the pews full of women in frowsy faded bonnets--the bonnets of Dalston. She saw the parish room lighted by unshaded gas-burners, in which, shy as she was, she had held classes for work-girls. Again she watched them bending over their desks, giggling and nudging one another when she entered the room.