She said good-bye to the house: her bedroom beneath which the motor-omnibuses clanged, the sitting-room with the family group, the passage with the Armed Men, the dark hall with the green baize door ... then good-bye to Aunt Elizabeth (two kisses), Aunt Anne (one kiss), Martha, Thomas the cat, the parrot ... all, everything, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye! May I never see any of you again. Never, never, never, never! ... She was helped into the car, rugs were wrapped round her, there was a warm cosy smell of rich leather, a little clock ticked away, a silver vase with red and blue flowers winked at her, and Katherine was there close beside her ... Never again, never again! And yet how strange, as they turned the corner of the street down into the Strand, Maggie felt a sudden pang of regret, of pathos, of loneliness, as though she were leaving something that had loved her dearly, and leaving it without a word of friendliness. "Poor dear!" She wanted to return, to tell it ... to tell it what? She had made her choice. She was plunging now into the other half of the world, and plunging not quite alone, because she was taking Martin with her. "I do hope you won't mind, dear," said Katherine. "My cousin Paul--the clergyman you met once--is staying with us. He and his sister. No one else." "Oh, I shan't mind," said Maggie. Her fingers, inside her blouse, tightly clutched the little pearl ring. CHAPTER II PLUNGE INTO THE OTHER HALF For a week Maggie was so comfortable that she could think of nothing but that. It must be remembered that she had never before known what comfort was, never at St. Dreot's, never at Aunt Anne's, and these two places had been the background of all her life. She had never conceived of the kind of way that she now lived. Her bedroom was so pretty that it made her almost cry to look at it: the wall-paper scattered with little rosy trees, the soft pink cretonne on the chairs, the old bureau with a sheet of glass covering its surface that was her dressing-table, the old gold mirror--all these things were wonders indeed. She was ordered to have breakfast in bed; servants looked after her with a kindliness and ease and readiness to help that she had never dreamed of as possible. The food was wonderful; there was the motor ready to take her for a drive in the afternoon, and there was the whole house at her service, soft and cosy and ordered so that it seemed to roll along upon its own impulse without any human agency. "I believe if every one went away and left it," she thought, "it would go on in exactly the same way."