What galled her chiefly, however, were the attentions with which she was honoured by the young men of the establishment. Worst of all, the oiled and curled Mr. Waters singled her out as the object of his especial admiration, till at length she lost her temper, and answered him in such a fashion as to check his advances once and for all. He left her muttering “You shall pay for that”; and he kept his word, for thenceforth her life was made a misery to her, and it seemed that she could do nothing right. As it chanced, he could not actually discharge her, for Joan had attracted the favourable notice of one of the owners of the business, who, when Mr. Waters made some trumped-up complaint against her, dismissed it with a hint that he had better be more careful as to his facts in future. For the rest, she had no amusements and no friends, and during all the time she spent in London she never visited a theatre or other place of entertainment. Her only recreation was to read when she could get the books, or, failing this, to sit with little Mrs. Bird in the Kent Street parlour and perfect herself in the art of conversation with the deaf and dumb. As may be imagined, such an existence did not tend to cause Joan to forget her past, or the man who was to her heart what the sun is to the world. She could renounce him, she could go away vowing that she would never see him more; but to live without him, and especially to live such a life as hers, ah! that was another matter. Moreover, as time went on, a new terror took her, that, vague in the beginning, grew week by week more definite and more dreadful. At first she could scarcely believe it, for somehow such a thing had never entered into her calculations; but soon she was forced to acknowledge it as a fact, an appalling, unalterable fact, which, as yet secret to herself, must shortly become patent to the whole world. The night that the truth came home to her without the possibility of further doubt was perhaps the most terrible which she ever spent. For some hours she thought that she must go mad: she wept, she prayed, she called upon the name of her lover, who, although he was the author of her woe, in some mysterious fashion had now grown doubly dear to her, till at last sleep or insensibility brought her relief. But sleep passes with the darkness, and she awoke to find this new spectre standing by her bedside and to know that there it must always stand till the end came. All that day she went about her work dazed by her secret agony of mind, but in the evening her senses seemed to come back to her, bringing with them new and acuter suffering.