“Therefore you were not always in receipt of such good wages as you get now. Now go in and get tea ready. And take care the toast is not burnt again.” I could see that she glared at him with her great black eyes like a tigress at bay, but she did not dare to answer again, but slunk away cowed into the house. I was not surprised, for the tone of cold command with which he spoke those last insignificant words inspired me with a sudden sense of fear of him, with a feeling that I was face to face with an irresistible will, such as I should have thought it impossible for light-hearted Mr. Rayner to inspire. The whole scene had puzzled me a little. What did Sarah the housemaid want to stand like a spy in the shrubbery for? How had Mr. Rayner seen and recognized her without seeming even to look in that direction? Was there any deeper meaning under the words that had passed between them? There was suppressed passion in the woman’s manner which could hardly have been stirred by her master’s orders to keep to the garden paths and not to burn the toast; and there was a hard decision in Mr. Rayner’s which I had never noticed before, even when he was seriously displeased. I waited behind the curtain by the window until long after he had gone back towards the study, feeling guiltily that his sharp eyes must find me out, innocently as I had played the spy. If he were to speak to me in the tone that he had used to Sarah, I felt that I should run away or burst into tears, or do something else equally foolish and unbecoming in an instructress of youth. But no one molested me. When I crept away from the window and went softly upstairs to my room, there was no one about, and no sound to be heard in the house save a faint clatter of tea-things in the servants’ hall. At tea-time Mr. Rayner was as bright as usual, and laughingly declared that they should never trust me to go to church by myself again. That night I pondered Mr. Reade’s warning to me to leave the Alders; but I soon decided that the suggestion was quite unpractical. For, putting aside the fact that I had no stronger grounds than other people’s prejudice and suspicion for thinking it imprudent to stay, and that I could see no sign of the dangers Mr. Reade had hinted at so vaguely, what reason could I offer either to my employers or to my mother for wishing to go? This sort of diffidence at inventing excuses is a strong barrier to action in young people. And, if I had overcome this diffidence sufficiently to offer a plausible motive for leaving the Alders, where was I to go?