"You don't mean to say she was wanting to commit suicide?" he said, after a short reflective silence, with his head bent but his eyes raised peeringly to Hilda's. The crudity of the word, 'suicide,' affected Hilda painfully. "If you ask me," said she, standing with her back rubbing against the small wardrobe, "she didn't know quite what she was doing; but there's no doubt that was what she went out for." "You overtook her? I saw you coming up from the beach." Hilda related what had happened. "But had you any notion--before--" "Me? No! Why?" "Nothing! Only the way you rushed out like that!" "Well--it struck me all of a sudden!... You've not seen her since you came in?" He shook his head. "I thought I'd better keep out of the way. I thought I'd better leave it all to you. It's appalling, simply appalling!... Just when everything was shaping so well!" Hilda thought, bewildered: 'Shaping so well?' With her glance she took in the little cheerless bedroom, and herself and George Cannon within it, overwhelmed. In imagination she saw all the other bedrooms, dark, forlorn, and inanimate, waiting through long nights and empty days until some human creature as pathetic as themselves should come and feebly vitalize them into a spurious transient homeliness; and she saw George Cannon's bedroom--the harsh bedroom of the bachelor who had never had a home; and the bedrooms of those fearsome mummies, the Watchetts, each bed with its grisly face on the pillow in the dark; and the kennels of the unclean servants; and so, descending through the floors, to Sarah Gailey's bedroom in the very earth, and the sleepless form on that bed, beneath the whole! And the organism of the boarding-house seemed absolutely tragic to her, compact of the stuff of sorrow itself! And yet George Cannon had said, 'Shaping so well!' "What's to be done?" he inquired plaintively. "Nothing that I can see!" she said. She had a tremendous desire to escape from the responsibility thrust on her by the situation; but she knew that she could never escape from it; that she was immovably pinned down by it.