IT was in the first week of April that Catherine began to look about for suitable lodgings. By this time the cottage at High Wood was half-naked of floor coverings: patches on the wallpaper showed where pictures had been wont to hang, and only essential furniture remained. The place was very dreary and inhospitable, and Catherine had many fits of depression during the last two weeks of March, which were bitterly cold and rainy. She was looking forward eagerly to the coming of the warm weather, and with the first of April, which was warm and spring-like, her spirits rose. Rose, that is, merely by comparison with her previous state: ever since her illness a melancholy had settled on her soul which, though it occasionally darkened into deep despair, never broke into even passing radiance. The sale of her household effects had given her a credit balance of a hundred and ten pounds, and there was still a few pounds’ worth of furniture which she was keeping right until the last. Of late her arm had begun to improve somewhat, which made her unwilling to discontinue the massage treatment, though Madame Varegny was very costly. That and the incidental expenses of living would soon eat into her hundred and ten pounds. Yet on the morning of the first of April she was quite cheerful, relatively. It was as if a tiny ray of sunshine were shyly showing up behind the piles of clouds that had settled shiftless on her soul. The forest trees were just bursting into green leafage; the air warm and comforting; of all seasons this was the most hopeful and the most inspiring. She took a penny tram down to the Ridgeway Corner, and enjoyed the wind blowing in her face as she sat on the top deck. At the Ridgeway she turned down Hatchet Grove and into the haunts of her earliest days. The painful memories of her life were associated much more with “Elm Cottage” than with Kitchener Road. Kitchener Road, teeming with memories though it was, could bring her no pain and but mild regrets: the magnitude of more recent happenings took away from it whatever bitterness its memories possessed. She was walking down its concrete sidewalks before she realized where she was, and a certain vague familiarity with the landscape brought her to a standstill in front of the Co-operative Society branch depot. Everything was very little altered. A recent tree-planting crusade had given the road a double row of small and withered-looking copper beeches, each supported by a pole and encased in wire-netting. The Co-operative Society had extended its premises to include what had formerly been a disused workshop, but which now, renovated and changed almost beyond recognition, proclaimed itself to be a “licensed abattoir.” Catherine did not know what an abattoir was, but the name sounded curiously inhospitable. She passed by No. 24, and was interested to see that the present occupier, according to a tablet affixed to the side of the porch, was