She stayed late at the Priory, though she knew, guiltily, that Aunt Adela was away and Gran’papa would eat a lonely supper. But she dreaded the solitary walk home and the quiet evening and the long night of thoughts that lay before her. She went off at last with unnecessary last words to Coral and Mrs. Cloud, and glanced back, as she went down the drive, at the friendly house with the lamplight streaming from its big bay windows and Justin’s shadow on the blind of his den, as if in leaving it she left behind her, safety. The gate clashed at her heels. The night was soft, very quiet, neither warm nor cold. There was no star in the sky and her only guide between the vague hedges was the dim earth-shine of the chalk road, stretching out ahead of her like the silvery track of a snail. She pulled her cloak about her, huddling into herself. Her body was warm, but the loneliness of the night had put out cold fingers and touched her throat. She could hear the little human sounds she made, of breath and movement, rippling out and being smothered in that ocean of silence. Presently she descended into the deeper darkness of tree-thatched Wisdom Lane, where the banks were steep and a huge chestnut put a period to the run of the brambles. It was half circled by a seat that was unsightly enough in the daytime, littered with paper and orange-peel and the whirled siftings of the road—a wind’s dust-pan, a perch for the birds, an urchins’ parliament. But at night lovers sat there. Laura, who had so often passed by with a smile or a shrug of cool wonder at the ways of ‘poor people,’ content to court in public, swerved suddenly off the path and into the road, slipping by the dark seat like a shadow. Yet she had, unwillingly, a glimpse of the couple that, since she could remember, always seemed the same, sitting as they always sat, clasped, motionless, the woman’s head on the man’s breast, the faces grey-white like the road beyond the shadows. Laura, in that glance, half recognized their own maid, doubtfully, as a goodwife eyes a changeling. She knew—her common sense told her—that at ten o’clock Ellen would slip through a back door and appear five minutes later, capped and decent and respectful, with a tray and glasses in her hand, and no inexplicable glory on her common face. But at this moment, she, Laura, the mistress, was ignored: was not even seen. She knew that she might pass and repass a dozen times and they would not stir. She was inconsiderable, invisible, impalpable. She did not exist.