The truth was that she had been thoroughly disheartened and did not like to own up to it. So she began to study for matriculation, but she was not fond of this kind of study, and it took all her strength of mind to keep it up. Perseverance, however, will do much, and when she had worked successfully through a book on mechanics she felt almost as if she had worked successfully through the examination itself. Still, as time went on she began to grow low-spirited. Never in all her life before had she stuck persistently to books. Never had she let more than four months at most pass without writing some story or other; it had seemed a part and a necessity of her life. Now month followed month, and one year lengthened almost into two, and still she stuck to the lesson books. Low spirits were natural to her, but this was a place which would never dispel them. The unkindnesses, the unpleasant quarrels weighed on her just as much as her failures, and no amount of not-caring could ever take the sting away. Besides, there were other troubles, flimsy skeletons in the cupboard that one never mentions, sending out at times their unwholesome odour from between the narrow chinks. The wish to pray, to cast this heavy, darkening burden on to other shoulders grew. Deborah prayed to Christ, as she had never prayed for anything before, except her father, to give her faith and light to throw off the gloom. She might just as well have prayed to a stone wall; to pray was simply to increase the gloom, an empty mirage that on approach mocked at the struggling traveller’s pain. All the time she could spare from lessons she spent in that other world; it was the one bright spot in her life, the thing for which she was ineffably thankful. One day at the beginning of the last year of the old century she sat down to work out a problem in mechanics. She never solved it. Indefinitely she began to scribble on the paper as in the olden time. “Oh, God!” she cried, “give me a man who can resist temptation for the sake of good, and not because he is bound in by tradition or the world.” And straightway she left this world and flew to that other. There she found the man she wanted, him who had gone there so strangely long ago as it seemed from the printed picture. And Deborah began to write, and having once taken up the pen had not the power to lay it down. CHAPTER XVII From that time forward the village, its inmates, and the school became blanks to her. True, the school dragged her down like a prison chain each day, for she had grown to hate teaching, almost to loathe it. She watched the clock from hour to hour as it crawled slowly round, and longed with feverish impatience for the time when the trivial lessons should be over and she free to write again. Never before had she written with such an absorbed interest, nor been so utterly unconscious of everything around.