After several weeks she had naturally begun to think of religion; for the malady alone was proof enough that she had a profoundly religious nature. Miss Gailey could rarely go to church, but one Sunday morning-- doubtless with intent--she asked Hilda if they should go together, and Hilda agreed. As they approached the large, high-spired church, Hilda had vague prickings of hope, and was thereby much astonished. But the service in no way responded to her expectations. "How silly I am!" she thought disdainfully. "This sort of thing has never moved me before. Why should it move me now?" The sermon, evangelical, was upon the Creed, and the preacher explained the emotional quality of real belief. It was a goodish sermon. But the preacher had effectually stopped the very last of those exquisite vague prickings of hope. Hilda agreed with his definition of real belief, and she knew that real belief was impossible for her. She could never say, with joyous fervour: "I believe!" At best she could only assert that she did not disbelieve--and was she so sure even of that? No! Belief had been denied to her; and to dream of consolation from religion was sentimentally womanish; even in her indifference she preferred straightforward, honest damnation to the soft self-deceptions of feminine religiosity. Ah! If she could have been a Roman Catholic, genuine and convinced--with what ardour would she have cast herself down before the confessional, and whispered her sinfulness to the mysterious face within; and with what ecstasy would she have received the absolution--that cleansing bath of the soul! Then--she could have recommenced!... But she was not a Roman Catholic. She could no more become a Roman Catholic than she could become the queen of some romantic Latin country of palaces and cathedrals. She was a young provincial girl staying in a boarding-house at Hornsey, on the Great Northern line out of London, and she was suffering from nervous breakdown. Such was the exterior common sense of the situation. Occasionally the memory of some verse of Victor Hugo, sounding the beat of one of his vast melancholies, would float through her mind and cause it to vibrate for an instant with a mournful sensation that resembled pleasure. IV "Are you thinking of getting up, dear?" asked Sarah Gailey, as she arranged more securely the contents of the tray and found space on it for her weekly books. "Yes, I suppose I may as well," Hilda murmured. "It'll be lunch-time soon." The days were long, yet somehow they seemed short too. Already before getting up, she would begin to think of the evening and of going to bed; and Saturday night followed quickly on Monday morning. It was scarcely credible that sixteen weeks had passed, thus, since her mother's death,--sixteen weeks whose retrospect showed no achievement of any kind, and hardly a desire. "I've given those Boutwoods notice," said Sarah Gailey suddenly, the tray in her hands ready to lift. "Not really?"