She was surprised to discover that she was not singular in this decision, and she wondered if all; the clients that stayed so long had anywhere else to go. Many of them never turned a leaf, but sat at the table dreamily eyeing a journal; as if they had forgotten that it was there. She; watched the people coming in, noting the unanimity with which they made for the advertisement-sheets first, and speculating as to the nature of the work they sought. There was a woman garbed in black, downcast and precise; she was a governess, manifestly. Once, when she had been young, and insolent with the courage of youth, she would have mocked a portrait looking as she looked now; there was little enough mockery left in her this morning. She quitted the "dailies" unrewarded, and proceeded to the table, her thin-lipped mouth set a trifle harder than before. A girl with magenta feathers in her hat bounced in, tracing her way down the columns with a heavy fore-finger, and departing nonchalantly with a blotted list. This was a domestic servant, Mary understood. A shabby man of sinister expression covered an area of possibilities: a broken-down tutor perhaps, a professional man gone to the bad. He looked like Mephistopheles in the prompter's clothes, she thought, contemplating him with languid curiosity. The reflections flitted across the central idea while she sat nervously waiting for the hours to pass, and when she considered it was time at last, she asked the newsagent in which direction Finchley lay. She omitted to mention that she had to walk there, but she obtained sufficient information about a tram-route to guide her up to Hampstead Heath, where of course she could inquire again. The sun gave no promise of shining, and a bleak wind, tossing the rubbish of the gutters into little whirlpools, made pedestrianism exceedingly unpleasant. She was dismayed to find on how long a journey she was bound; she arrived at the tram-terminus already tired, and then learnt that she was not half-way to Finchley. It was nothing but a name to her, and steadily trudging along a road that extended itself before her eternally she began to fear that she would never reach her goal at all. To add to the discomfort, it was snowing slightly now, and she grew less sanguine with every hundred yards. The vision of the smiling lady, the buoyancy of her own glib sentences, faded from her, and the thought of the utter abjectness that would come of refusal made the salvation of acceptance appear much too wonderful to occur. When she reached it, "Trebartha" proved to be a stunted villa in red brick. It was one of a row, each of the other stunted villas being similarly endowed with a name befitting, a domain; and suspense catching discouragement from the most extraneous details, Mary's heart sank as the housemaid disclosed the badly-lighted passage.