It was only when night fell, when the silence of the small house fell round her, when the few people about were all asleep, and the street, upon which her room looked out, was quiet as the grave, that the pleasure of these recollections failed. She got chilled in the mournful silence. It was a still night, and the sound from the sea came very softly upon her ear, like a cadence measured and gentle. All was very still in Miss Jean’s maiden habitation. The two maids slept down stairs at a distance from the other rooms. They went to bed at ten o’clock, as indeed did the little town with very few exceptions. Looking out from her window, as Marjory did by habit, being used to look out every night upon the sea, she saw opposite to her, in place of the intermittent gleam of the lighthouse to which she was accustomed, a steady glimmer in young Hepburn’s window, which was opposite. That was the only sign of fellowship in all the shadowy silent little town, where there was a sense of the presence of others without any sign of friendliness from them. This light roused in Marjory a vague uneasiness in the midst of so many other heavy thoughts. What was it that it recalled to her? Some other kind of light, some other sympathy. She dropped the blind and went in, and sat down wearily. A stifling sense of loss and dreary vacancy came upon her. All her life long Pitcomlie and its interests had been her first thought. She had become the mistress of the house at a very early age, when she was little more than a child; and through all her subsequent life this care and occupation was all to her that a man’s purpose is to him, filling her mind and mixing itself with all her expectations. Marjory had never loved any man with that strong and personal affection which overcomes all hindrances; but she had been loved and wooed, and no doubt, but for this, might have married one of her suitors or another. She had not, however, found herself able--she had not “had time” to let such an idea seize hold upon her mind. It had seemed so impossible that Pitcomlie, her father, her uncle, her baby-sister, and in the earlier period of her incumbency, “the boys,” could do without her. It was impossible, quite impossible, she had said, when any dawn of inclination seemed rising within her. Thus she set herself and her own life aside as a secondary thing, and gave herself up to duties which an illness or an accident might terminate at any moment, without help or warning, leaving her stranded high and dry upon the shore. Women are trained to make such sacrifices, and make them daily, with the reward of being smiled at as old maids a little later, by their juniors who have known no such bond of duty. Marjory was far beyond the possibility of feeling such a penalty. She was thinking nothing of the consequences, nor of what her future life should be. What she felt was that the use of her was over, that her duties were finally done, that Pitcomlie wanted her no more,