The little servant girl was grinning maliciously. “She’s in the d--’s own temper and all, and you’re going to catch it hot and strong for leaving her to put the children to bed.” “Mind your own business, Florrie,” said Elsie, pushing past her. She affected not to hear the single word that the servant flung at her back, but it made her wince. In the bedroom she found Gladys already in bed, wide awake. “Mother put us to bed. She was awfully cross, and she slapped Sonnie twice and me once.” “What for?” “Oh, because I whined, she said. And she slapped Sonnie when he told her about Dadda being so funny with you. You didn’t know we _saw_ one day,” giggled Gladys. “Saw what?” “One day when Dadda kissed you and Sonnie and I saw, over the banisters, and we laughed, but you didn’t hear us.” “You little viper!” muttered Elsie between her teeth. “I’d like to kill you, I would.” Gladys alternately giggled and whined, and Elsie was quite unable to distinguish whether the child was really malicious or simply amused by something to which she attached no meaning. “Anyway, if she’s told her mother, it’s all up,” thought Elsie. She saw that there was nothing for it but to leave Mortimer Crescent, and spent a miserable night wondering what to say to her mother and sister. At midnight she heard the sound of the doctor’s key in the front door and his heavy foot on the stairs. He paused outside her door for some seconds, then she heard him go into his wife’s room. Elsie tossed about in her narrow bed. Her present dilemma frightened her, and she had a vague, irrational idea that some awful and horrible penalty always descended sooner or later upon girls who had done as she had done. These fears, and her lack of any vivid imagination, had dulled her emotional susceptibilities, and she scarcely felt regret at the thought of no longer seeing the doctor. He now stood to her for the symbol of an assuaged desire, the fulfilment of which had brought about her present miseries. Nevertheless, at the back of her consciousness was latent the conviction that never again would she be satisfied with the clumsy demonstrations and meaningless contacts of her intercourse with the boys and youths whom she had known at home. It seemed to her next morning that she was wholly ugly. Her complexion looked sodden and her eyes were nearly invisible. Her mouth, in some odd way, seemed to have swollen. No one could have called her pretty, and to anyone who had seen her in good looks she would have been almost unrecognisable. Mrs. Woolley, coming downstairs at ten o’clock, eyed her with a malignant satisfaction. “Perhaps,” she said, “you won’t be altogether surprised to hear that I’m going to make some changes. You’d better pack your box, and go home to your mother, I think.” “I was going to tell you that I couldn’t stay on here any longer,” said Elsie swiftly. “The ways of the house aren’t what I’ve been used to, Mrs. Woolley.”