She remembered the look of the street when after the appointed hour for her class, she emerged from the stuffy room into the night air. There was a butcher’s shop opposite, with a row of flaring lights, and the butcher in a greasy apron used to stand upon the pavement shouting his wares to the hurrying passers-by. Then there was the return to the dingy house. A hurried lighting of the gas in the entrance passage, the glare of which revealed the oil-cloth on the floor, growing more worn and shabby every year. How well Anne remembered what was left of the pattern of that oil-cloth! A descent into the kitchen followed, where she prepared the supper, and directed the clumsy movements of Harriet, the little maid-of-all-work. Supper then with her father, who sometimes scarcely raised his head from his plate, and seldom spoke a word. Anne remembered one or two of the curates who had tried to make friends with her. One of them who sometimes insisted upon walking back with her from her evening class, had hovered upon the verge of a mild flirtation. But to Anne, desperately shy and unused to the society of her fellow-creatures, his words were meaningless and embarrassing. Moreover, her father was unpopular. Frequently embroiled with his colleagues, none of them sought his society, and none ventured to a house to which they were never invited. In retrospect, she scarcely needed aid from the journal, Anne saw the years pass in grey procession. There was no note of revolt in the record of her girlhood’s days, and the reading was the sadder for its absence. No revolt, no bitterness. Only a sad acquiescence with fate, a gradual numbing of sensation, a sort of mental and moral apathy, grey, leaden, hopeless. She paused at the words which followed the announcement of her twenty-seventh birthday. “Last week father was taken suddenly very ill. The doctor is afraid it is paralysis.” For three years there was no further word in the book, but Anne knew those three years by heart. They were passed chiefly between the sick-room and the kitchen, in which she prepared invalid food, and directed the little maid in the management of the housework. Helpless as a child, her father required constant unremitting attendance, and when on the eve of her thirtieth birthday he died, Anne found herself literally penniless. The long illness had swallowed up his scanty earnings, and, unprepared for any work in the world, his daughter was left to face starvation. Fastened inside the book was the letter which saved her. It was written in the thin, quavering handwriting of an old woman even then ill and feeble. She opened and read it. “Fairholme Court, “February, 18-- “_My dear Anne_,