It was at night when she was most a prey to unquiet thoughts. Tired with her many hours' work at the piano, she would fall into a deep sleep, with every prospect of its continuing till Mrs Scatchard would bring up her morning cup of tea, when Mavis would suddenly awaken, to remain for interminable hours in wide-eyed thought. She would go over and over again events in her past life, more particularly those that had brought her to her present pass. The immediate future scarcely bothered her at all, because, for the present, she was pretty sure of employment at the academy. On the very rare occasions on which she suffered her mind to dwell on what would happen after her child was born, should Perigal not fulfil his repeated promises, her vivid imagination called up such appalling possibilities that she refused to consider them; she had enough sense to apply to her own case the wisdom contained in the words, "sufficient for the day is the evil thereof." In these silent watches of the night, so protracted and awesome was the quiet, that it would seem to the girl's preternatural sensibilities as if the life of the world had come to a dead stop, and that only she and the little one within her were alive. Then she would wonder how many other girls in London were in a like situation to hers; if they were constantly kept awake obsessed by the same fears; also, if, like her, they comforted themselves by clasping a ring which they wore suspended on their hearts--a ring given them by the loved one, even as was hers. Then she would fall to realising the truth of the saying, "How easily things go wrong." It seemed such a little time since she had been a happy girl at Melkbridge (if she had only realised how really happy she was!), with more than enough for her everyday needs, when her heart was untrammelled by love; when she was healthful, and, apart from the hours which she was compelled to spend at the office, free. Now--An alert movement within her was more eloquent than thought. Sometimes she would believe that her present visitation of nature was a punishment for her infringement of God's moral law; whilst at others she would rejoice with a pagan exultation that, whatever the future held in store, she had most gloriously lived in these crowded golden moments which were responsible for her present plight.