“There was a letter and a parcel came for you some days ago, but I don’t know if I can find them. If you’d have left your address I could have forwarded it on. But I’m too busy to keep an eye on stray letters kicking about and getting in the way when I’m dusting.” However, in the end she found what turned out to be a postcard from Mrs. Kino sending messages from herself and her husband. The parcel was a set of Japanese boxes, one inside the other down to the last one which was hardly bigger than a pin’s head. These were for Letizia to play with. There was nothing about Miss Fewkes that invited one to stay and gossip with her. So Nancy went away with her post, and as she did not want to visit Blackboy Passage again she left her address behind her in case any more letters did happen to come. That night Nancy lay awake for a long time, puzzling over the wisdom and morality of the step she had taken. Was it due to selfishness? Was it due to her own desire to be at work again? At work! At work again! No longer to lie here night after night, staring out of the curtainless window at the tawny London sky, her heart sick for his arms about her. The evenings might not be so long when she was working again. There would be indeed the poignancy of once more treading boards that he and she had trod together; there would be the agony of seeing again the familiar platforms along which he had run with cups of tea for her; there would be continuous reminders of what she had lost. Reminders? What reminders were needed to make more empty this empty world? At work again! At work! Every week a new town. Always something to distract her from this eternal ache, some poor little futile change, but still change—change and work. Was it very selfish of her to sacrifice Letizia to her own need? Very wrong and very selfish? Yet even from a practical point of view, surely it was right to take this money when she had the chance? She could not leave Letizia with Mrs. Pottage indefinitely. To refuse an offer like this while she accepted the old landlady’s charity would put her in such a humiliating position. Bram surely would not blame her. He would remember what had happened when she went to his brother, and she would know that she had tried to put her own feelings on one side. It made such a difference to open her purse and hear the crackle of that five-pound note when she put in her hand to find a penny for the bus-conductor. It was as comforting and warm as the crackling of a fire in wintertime. “Oh, my darling,” she cried toward the stars that were visible again at last after that unending black frost, “my precious one, I don’t think I have any more courage left. I can’t live alone any longer and wonder what I shall have to pawn of ours next.”