I couldn't get that wretched cup back on to its saucer again without spilling the coffee. If that is how I still behave, what has been the good of being here? What has the time been but wasted? What has the cure been but a failure? I have come up to my room. I can't stay downstairs. It would be unbearable this morning to sit and be read to. But I must try to think of an excuse, quickly. Mrs. Barnes may be up any minute to ask--oh, I am hunted! It is a comfort to write this. To write does make one in some strange way less lonely. Yet--having to go and look at oneself in the glass for companionship,--isn't that to have reached the very bottom level of loneliness? _Evening._ The direct result of those letters has been to bring Dolly and me at last together. She came down to the kitchen-garden after me, where I went this morning when I had succeeded in straightening myself out a little. On the way I told Mrs. Barnes, with as tranquil a face as I could manage, that I had arrangements to discuss with Antoine, and so, I was afraid, would for once miss the reading. Antoine I knew was working in the kitchen-garden, a plot of ground hidden from the house at the foot of a steep descent, and I went to him and asked to be allowed to help. I said I would do anything,--dig, weed, collect slugs, anything at all, but he must let me work. Work with my hands out of doors was the only thing I felt I could bear to-day. It wasn't the first time, I reflected, that peace has been found among cabbages. Antoine demurred, of course, but did at last consent to let me pick red currants. That was an easy task, and useful as well, for it would save Lisette the assistant's time, who would otherwise presently have to pick them. So I chose the bushes nearest to where he was digging, because I wanted to be near some one who neither talked nor noticed, some one alive, some one kind and good who wouldn't look at me, and I began to pick these strange belated fruits, finished and forgotten two months ago in the valley. Then I saw Dolly coming down the steps cut in the turf. She was holding up her long black skirt. She had nothing on her head, and the sun shone in her eyes and made her screw them up as she stood still for a moment on the bottom step searching for me. I saw all this, though I was stooping over the bushes. Then she came and stood beside me. 'You oughtn't to be here,' I said, going on picking and not looking at her. 'I know,' said Dolly. 'Then hadn't you better go back?' 'Yes. But I'm not going to.' I picked in silence. 'You've been crying,' was what she said next. 'No,' I said. 'Perhaps not with your eyes, but you have with your heart.' At this I felt very much like Mrs. Barnes; very much like what Mrs. Barnes must have felt when I tried to get her to be frank. 'Do you know what your sister said to me the other day?' I asked, busily picking. 'She said she has a great opinion of discretion.' 'Yes,' said Dolly. 'But I haven't.'