The small window was of ground glass and gave no prospect of the outer world, from which it seemed to Hilda that she was as completely cut off as in a prison. She was alone with George Cannon, and beyond the narrow walls which caged them together, and close together, there was nothing! All Brighton, save this room, had ceased to exist. Hilda was now more than ever affrighted, shamed, perturbed, agonised. Yet at the same time she had the desperate calm of the captain of a ship about to founder with all hands. And she saw glimpses, beautiful and compensatory, of the romantic quality of common life. She was in a little office of a perfectly ordinary boarding-house--(she could even detect the stale odours of cooking)--with a realistic man of business, and they were about to discuss a perfectly ordinary piece of scandal; and surely they might be called two common-sense people! And withal, the ordinariness and the midland gumption of the scene were shot through with the bright exotic rays of romance! She thought: "It is painful and humiliating to be caught and fixed as I am. But it is wonderful too!" "The fact is," said George Cannon, in an easy reassuring tone, "we never get the chance of a bit of quiet chat. Upon my soul we don't! Now I suppose it's Sarah who's been worrying you?" "Yes." "What did she say?... You'd better sit down, don't you think?" He swung round the pivoted arm-chair in front of the closed desk and pointed her to it. "Oh!" Hilda hesitated, and then sank on to the chair without looking at it. "She simply said there was a lot of talk about you and me. Has she been saying anything to you?" He shook his head, staring down at her. Hilda put her arms on the arms of the chair, and, shirking the man's gaze, stared down at the worn carpet and at his boots thereon. One instinct in her desired that he should move away or that the room should be larger, but another instinct wanted him to remain close, lest the savour of life should lose its sharpness. "It passes me how people can say such things!" she went on, in a low, thrilled, meditative voice. "I can't understand it!" She was quite sincere in her astonished indignation. Nevertheless, she experienced a positive pride at being brought into a scandal with George Cannon; she derived from it a certain feeling of importance; it proved that she was no longer a mere girlish miss. George Cannon kept silence. "I shall leave Brighton," Hilda continued. "That I've quite decided! I don't like leaving your sister, as ill as she is! But really--" And she thought how prudent she was, and how capable of taking care of herself--she all alone in the world! "Where should you go to? Bursley? The Orgreaves?" George Cannon asked absently and carelessly. "I don't know," said Hilda, with curtness.