The killing of her hope was no mercy. Even that sick thing had been better than this emptiness, this death. Hope had sustained her for years, for years she had had nothing more robust to feed on than her pale infatuation for a man who seldom gave her crumbs. She had become skilled in hoping, long practice made her an experienced artificer of hope, able to build a palace out of a few broken bricks. She had never known any other love than this ghost of one, so there had never been a chance of its dying of comparison. She had no intimate girl friends, and Ivy’s full-blooded affairs struck her only with the grossness of their quality, giving her own by contrast a refinement and poetry that made it doubly precious. Then had come the wonderland of those harvest days, when hope had almost passed into confidence, when all the wonderful things of love she had never learned yet—glamour, pride, perfection, satisfaction—had shown her their burning shapes. But it had all been false, a mirage of that same hope’s sick intensity, an overreaching of the artificer’s skill; and now her tears had turned to mud the golden dust of harvest, and all her dreams were dead—and stuck to her still, clogging and fouling, like this mud of Slivericks Lane on her boots. Luckily, her day-long absence made it possible for her to hide her wretchedness from her family. At school her listlessness was commented on—a listlessness alternating with an increased nerviness and a tendency to cry when found fault with—but as Nell had always been a little languid and a little hysterical, these exaggerations of her natural state were put down to her health, and the schoolmistress persuaded her to take a patent medicine containing iron. Her love affair had been conducted on such delicate lines that only a few had noticed it, and no one except Ivy had given it any importance. Ivy was intensely sorry for her sister, and on one Sunday’s visit dared to probe her state. But Nell was like a poor little cat caught by the tail, and could only scratch and spit, so Ivy good-naturedly gave up the effort. She was quite her old self again, judging by the “pals” she brought over to Worge on her Sundays off—Motorman Hodder and Motorman Davis, and Sergeant Staples, and Private La Haye, and Corporal Bunch of the Moose Jaws, and other Canadians quartered at Hastings, who sat in the kitchen, saying, “Sure” and “Yep” and “Nope.” “Reckon it’s kill or cure wud you,” said Mrs. Beatup, and no one knew precisely what she meant. Nell thought her worst moment would be when she delivered to Mr. Poullett-Smith the pretty little speech she had been making up ever since she heard of his engagement. It was fairly bad, for Marian Lamb was with him and had already assumed a galliard air of proprietorship.