It was no use expecting him yet, however, so she made a determined effort to school herself to patience. Mr. Baines, as all the village was aware, was hardly the sort to rise up early in order to bathe his face in morning dew. Besides, as she reminded herself again, this enchanting dispensation of Providence could not possibly seem as important to him as it did to her. Why, in the pressure of business he might even forget it—let it stand over, perhaps, until to-morrow! Mrs. Clapham could hardly restrain herself from rushing off to sit waiting for him on his office doorstep when she thought of _that_. She found herself wishing, with a fervour that almost surprised her, that this was Mrs. Wrench’s “day,” after all. She remembered how she had chuckled, on waking, to think it was nothing of the sort, but she was not so sure that she felt like chuckling now. Even with Mrs. Wrench it was sometimes possible to slip a word in edgeways, if you tried; and in spite of her absorption in Miss Marigold and Miss Marigold’s gowns, she would surely have spared a moment to tell her how matters stood. But it was not Mrs. Wrench’s day, so it was no use thinking about it. It was nobody’s “day,” for the matter of that. It was her own day, to do as she liked with from rise to set, and just for the moment it threatened to hang on her hands. She tried to make a bargain with herself that she wouldn’t look at the clock for another half-hour, and found her eyes stealing round to it the very next minute. She almost wished—so desperately was she at a loose end—that she had gone up the street to speak to Emma Catterall. She hated Tibbie’s mother-in-law as she hated nobody else on earth, but even Emma would have been better than nothing. She went to the window at last, to see whether she had re-emerged, bending her pink face above the box of pink asters, the Family Bible and the clock. But there was no sign of Emma, as far as she could tell, although, as it happened, Emma, at that moment, was also peering out. There were no flowers in Emma’s window, but only a few half-dead ferns; nevertheless in the blankness and gloom of her dismal dwelling she was hidden as in a cave. When Mrs. Clapham could bear the waiting no longer, she fetched pail and brush from the back kitchen, and got herself down to scrub the floor. The place was already so clean that her energy seemed rather wasted, but, although she was unaware of it, there was something symbolical in the act. In its own way it was a sort of dedication, a cleansing of everything round her for the coming event. In any case, nothing that hadn’t been washed since the day before was ever quite clean to Mrs. Clapham. Yesterday was yesterday, and to-day was to-day, and nobody knew better than she just how far dirt could manage to spread itself in a single night.