“Helmer bangs the door; not Nora!” she smiled to herself. She felt extraordinarily gay. The more serious aspects of the step she was taking were not obvious to her at the present moment. She was for the time merely possessed by an irrepressible zeal for the assertion of self, and its disassociation from all trammelling human responsibilities. Presently Mrs. Poynder went out too, to attend some Busybodies’ committee meeting, and Mrs. Elles took three five-pound notes out of a drawer in her desk, locked it, and, going downstairs, ordered lunch and dinner very carefully. This duty accomplished, she went up to her room, and presented Jane, whom she found there, with a very handsome cloth dress she had hardly worn, and her blessing. The affectionate and devoted Jane wept, and it was with difficulty that her mistress prevented herself from crying too. Then Jane went about her business, and Mrs. Elles locked herself in. She undid the complicated arrangement of her hair and with a comb parted it as severely as she could resign herself to do, and with a brush dipped in water smoothed out the little curls on her forehead, sighing deeply the while. Then she went to a cupboard, and from its most recondite recesses produced a box containing a pair of blue spectacles--her husband’s. She put them on, and standing resolutely in front of a cheval glass, surveyed her appearance. “Good God, can I bear it?” she said aloud, in tones of the very deepest anguish. Her face grew sombre for the first time since the conception of flight had become an established fact in her mind. She desperately tugged down a lock and disposed it becomingly on her forehead as usual, and then put it back again.---- “No!... Yes!... I must do it like this.... It is the only way I can do it without blame.... It shows that my intentions are honourable.... I am going away to be free, not to flirt.... I must make all that an absolute impossibility!” She flung a lace scarf over the glass and busied herself with a few necessary preparations. She got out a Gladstone bag--just the size she could manage to carry herself--and threw in a few clothes, including a fine white muslin dress she had worn at her “at home” that day, so fine that it would go through a ring almost and took up no room to speak of. A rather valuable sapphire ring she put on her finger, and on second thoughts added a diamond one. Then she opened the door of her room, and leaning over the banisters called out, “Jane!” Jane replied. “Jane, will you go and draw down those blinds in the drawing-room--all of them--half down. The sun is getting so strong. And then, will you take the heap of letters you will see lying on the bureau, and go and post them at once.” She put on a sailor hat and a white lace veil over her blue spectacles, and was downstairs and out in the street before Jane had got to the fourth blind of the drawing-room, which happened to look out on the back of the house. Nora was gone! CHAPTER III