She went up to her room, arranged her Sunday School books, felt suddenly a grinding, hammering fatigue, as though she had been walking all day; her knees were trembling and her throat was dry. She sat by her window, looking down on to the garden, where the sea mist drove in walls of thin rain against the horizon. Behind the mist the trees seemed to peer at her as though they were wondering who she was. “I don’t care,” she thought, “he shouldn’t have spoken to me like that.” But how had it happened? At one moment they had been so close together that no force, no power, would separate them—a word and they had been so far apart that they could not see one another’s eyes. “I don’t care. He shouldn’t—” She got up, rubbed her cheeks with her hand because they were burning, and, with a glance at Philip’s photograph (someone she had known years ago and would never know again), went out. The house was silent, and she met no one. As she crossed the lawn she thought: “How absurd! We’ve quarrelled—a real quarrel”—then—“It wasn’t my fault. He shouldn’t—” She held her head very high indeed as she walked down the road to the Bridge, but she saw no one, felt no rain upon her cheek, was not conscious that she was moving. At the door of the Schools she saw Mrs. Smart, and heard someone say quite sensibly and happily: “We’re early. There won’t be many this afternoon, I expect.” “Mrs. Douglas has told me that she won’t be able to come—I wonder, Katie, whether you’d mind taking—” “Why, of course.” Mrs. Smart was little and round and brown like a pippin. She was always breathless from having more to wrestle with than she could grasp. She was nervous, too, and short-sighted, and the one governing motive of her life was to bear her husband a son. She had now four daughters; she knew that her husband felt it very deeply. She had once unburdened herself to Katherine, but, after that, had been shyer with her than before. Katherine, against her will, had been often irritated by Mrs. Smart—she had wondered at her restlessness and incapacity to keep up with the business in hand, but to-day, out of the sinister gloom of that horrible afternoon, the little woman seemed to Katie suddenly sympathetic, eloquent, moving. Katie could hear her voice, rather husky, rather uncertain, on that afternoon of her confession: “... and we did really hope that Lucy would be a boy, we really did. He would have been called Edward. Harold has such plans for a son—we have often thought together what we would do ... and now, I’m afraid....” Inside the schoolroom door Katie paused, looked at the room with the bare benches arranged in squares, the shining maps of the world and Europe, the case with beetles and butterflies, the hideous harmonium.