But when the holidays were over Carry’s anxious expectations and suspense increased again. Beaufort kept to his new toy even when Tom was gone. He would interrupt his studies, springing up, whatever he was doing, to pull down or put up that flag, till poor Carry’s heart grew sick of the little formula which accompanied all her movements. She began to feel that he liked to be disturbed and that idling forth into the air to perform this little ceremony was more delightful to him than to get on with that work, which, so far as she could make out, was not yet begun. He had found more notebooks after Tom went away, but the notebooks now began to pall a little. And slowly, slowly, Carry’s eyes began to open. She never whispered it to herself, but she began to understand, as the years went on many things that were never put into words. She became first of all very sick of the notebooks and the wonderful number of them, and all those tantalising scraps which never came to anything. Her own little poem which she had begun had gone no further. The dawning of genius--but the dawn was still going on. It had never come to be day yet. Would it ever come? Slowly, reluctantly, this began to be revealed to her, broken by many gleams of better hope, by moments when she said to herself that she was the most unjust woman in the world, grudging her husband the leisure in which alone great thoughts can develop--grudging him the very quiet which it had been the desire of her heart to attain for him. The most unjust of women! not his wife and assistant, but his judge, and so hard a one! It was bitter sweet to Carry to be able thus to condemn herself; but it did not change the position of affairs.