"What can I say to him? No business of mine, you know, except that we've lost a decent servant. But I expect that's Sarah's fault. She's no use whatever with servants, now, Sarah isn't." "_I_ shall never speak to Mr. Boutwood again!" Hilda exclaimed almost passionately. "Oh, but--" "His behaviour is simply scandalous. It's really wicked. A man like him!" George put his lips out deprecatingly. "You may depend she asked for it," he said. "What?" "She asked for it," he repeated with convinced firmness, and looked at her steadily. A flush slowly spread over her face and neck, and she lowered her gaze. In her breast pride and shame were again mingled. "You keep your hair on, littl'un," said George soothingly, and kissed her. Then he took his hat and stick, which were with a lot of other things on the broad white counterpane, and went off stylishly. "You don't understand," she threw at him with a delicious side-glance of reproof as he opened the door. She reproached herself for the deceiving coquetry of the glance. "Don't I?" he returned airily. He was quite sure that nothing escaped his intelligence. To Hilda, shocked by the coarseness and the obtuseness which evidently characterized his attitude, now as on other occasions, this self-confidence was desolating; it was ominously sinister. III She was alone with her image in the mirror, and the image was precisely the same that she had always seen; she could detect no change in it whatever. She liked the sensation of being alone and at home in this room which before she had only entered as an overseer and which she had never expected to occupy. She savoured the intimacy of the room--the necessaries on the washstand, the superb tortoiseshell brushes, bought by George in Dublin, on the dressing-table, the open trunks, George's clothes on a chair, and her own flimsy trifles on the bed. Through the glass she saw, behind her image, the image of the closed door; and then she turned round to look at the real door and to assure herself that it was closed. Childish! And yet...! George had shut the door. She remembered the noise of its shutting. And that noise, in her memory, seemed to have transformed itself into the sound of fate's deep bell. She could hear the clang, sharp, definite. She realized suddenly and with awe that her destiny was fixed hereafter. She had come to the end of her adventures and her vague dreams. For she had always dreamt vaguely of an enlarged liberty, of wide interests, and of original activities--such as no woman to her knowledge had ever had. She had always compared the life of men with the life of women, and admitted and resented the inferiority of the latter. She had had glimpses, once, of the male world; she had made herself the only woman shorthand-writer in the Five Towns, and one of the earliest in England--dizzy thought! But the glimpses had been vain and tantalizing. She had been in the male