in his face, in his bearing, which challenged and inflamed her imagination. It did not occur to her to think of Janet as in the future a married woman. But of herself she thought, with new agitations: "I am innocent now! I am ignorant now! I am a girl now! But one day I shall be so no longer. One day I shall be a woman. One day I shall be in the power and possession of some man--if not this man, then some other. Everything happens; and this will happen!" And the hazardous strangeness of life enchanted her. CHAPTER IV WITH THE ORGREAVES I The Orgreave family was holding its nightly session in the large drawing-room of Lane End House when Hilda and Janet arrived. The bow-window stood generously open in three different places, and the heavy outer curtains as well as the lace inner ones were moving gently in the capricious breeze that came across the oval lawn. The multitudinous sound of rain on leaves entered also with the wind; and a steam-car could be heard thundering down Trafalgar Road, from which the house was separated by only a few intervening minor roofs. Mrs. Orgreave, the plump, faded image of goodness, with Janet's full red lips and Janet's kindly eyes, sat as usual, whether in winter or in summer, near the fireplace, surveying with placidity the theatre where the innumerable dramas of her motherhood had been enacted. Tom, her eldest, the thin, spectacled lawyer, had, as a boy of seven, rampaged on that identical Turkey hearthrug, when it was new, a quarter of a century earlier. He was now seated at the grand piano with the youngest child, Alicia, a gawky little treasure, always alternating between pertness and timidity, aged twelve. Jimmie and Johnnie, young bloods of nineteen and eighteen, were only present in their mother's heart, being in process of establishing, by practice, the right to go forth into the world of an evening and return when they chose without suffering too much from family curiosity. Two other children--Marian, eldest daughter and sole furnisher of grandchildren to the family, and Charlie, a young doctor-- were permanently away in London. Osmond Orgreave, the elegant and faintly mocking father of the brood, a handsome grizzled man of between fifty and sixty, was walking to and fro between the grand piano and the small upright piano in the farther half of the room. "Well, my dear?" said Mrs. Orgreave to Hilda. "You aren't wet?" She drew Hilda towards her and stroked her shoulder, and then kissed her. The embrace was to convey the mother's sympathy with Hilda in the ordeal of the visit to Turnhill, and her satisfaction that the ordeal was now over. The ageing lady seemed to kiss her on behalf of the entire friendly family; all the others, appreciating the delicacy of the situation, refrained from the peril of clumsy speech. "Oh no, mother!" Janet exclaimed reassuringly. "We came up by car. And I had my umbrella. And it only began to rain in earnest just as we got to the gate."