Thus, however, the day went on. When Lady Markham again watched her children going down the avenue, one on either side of the new master of the house, with a softened look in her face, Alice turned away from her mother with the keenest displeasure; she forsook her altogether, going away from her to her own room, where she shut herself up and began to make a review of all her little possessions with the view of removing them, somewhere, anywhere, she did not care where. And very dismal visions crossed the inexperienced mind of Alice. She did not know how this miserable change in the family affairs affected her own position or her mother’s. She thought, perhaps, that they had lost everything, as Paul had lost everything. And sooner than live on the bounty of this stranger, Alice felt that there was nothing she could not do. She thought of going out as a governess, as girls do in novels. Why not? What was she better than the thousands of girls who did so, and rather that a hundred times, rather that or anything! Then it occurred to her that perhaps she might go with Paul. That, perhaps, would be a better way. Even in the former days, out of the midst of luxury and comfort, it had seemed to her that Paul’s dream of living a primitive life and cultivating his bit of land, his just share of the universal possession of man, had something fine, something noble in it. With her brother she could go to the end of the world to sustain and comfort him. What would she care what she did? Would she be less a lady if she cooked his dinner or washed his clothes? Nay, not at all. What better could any woman wish? But then there was this girl--the man’s daughter who had been at Markham with Paul. Thus Alice was suddenly stopped again. Walls of iron seemed to rise around her wherever she turned. Was it possible, was it possible? Paul, who was so fastidious, so hard to please! Thus when despairing of the circumstances around herself she turned to the idea of her brother, her heart grew sick with a new and cruel barrier before her. An alien had come into her home and spoiled it; an alien was to share her brother’s life and ruin that. All around her the world was breaking in with an insupportable intrusion--people who had nothing to do with her coming into the very sanctuary of her life. Lady Markham was going to put up with it, as it seemed, but Alice said to herself that she could not, would not, put up with it. She could not tell what she would do, or where she would flee, but to tolerate the man who had taken Paul’s inheritance, or the woman who had got Paul’s heart, was above her strength. Should she go out as a governess? this seemed the one outlet; or--was there any other?