No. 5, Cubitt Lane was undoubtedly respectable. Yet Catherine, even as she recognized this, was profoundly stirred at the realization of what this red-letter event meant to her. From the wreckage of her dreams and ideals only one remained intact, and that was her ambition as a pianist. That was her one link with the past, and also, she hoped, her one link with the future. She looked at the trumpery little eighteen-guinea piano she had brought with her and saw in it the embodiment of her one cherished ambition. Now that all the others were gone, this solitary survivor was more precious than ever before. Her hand was slowly improving, and soon she would start the long struggle again. Her determination was quieter, more dogged, more tenacious than ever, but the old fiery enthusiasm was gone. It was something that had belonged to her youth, and now that her youth had vanished it had vanished also. Mrs. Lazenby was a woman of unimpeachable respectability. Widowed and with one daughter, she led a life of pious struggling to keep her precarious footing on the edge of the lower middle classes. Every Sunday she attended the Duke Street Methodist Chapel and sang in a curious shrivelled voice every word of the hymns, chants and anthems. Her crown of glory was to be appointed superintendent of the fancy-work stall at the annual bazaar. She had not attended the chapel long enough to have known either Catherine’s father or mother, and nobody apparently had ever acquainted her with the one exciting event in the annals of the Literary and Debating Society. But she was “known by sight” and “well-respected” of all the leading Methodist luminaries, and once, when she was ill with lumbago, the Rev. Samuel Sparrow prayed for “our dear sister in severe pain and affliction.” Her daughter Amelia, a lank, unlovely creature of nineteen, was on week-days a shopgirl at one of the large West-end multiple stores, and on the Sabbath a somewhat jaded and uninspired teacher at the Methodist Sunday Schools. For the latter post she was in all respects singularly unfitted, but her mother’s pressure and her own inability to drift out of it as effortlessly as she had seemed to drift in kept her there. She was not a bad girl, but she was weak and fond of pleasure: this latter desire she had to gratify by stealth, and she was in a perpetual state of smothered revolt against the tyranny of home.