When they had left the room and Flora came in for the supper things, instead of sitting as usual at the far end of the table pretending to read, she stood planted on the hearthrug watching her. Flora’s hands were small and pale and serenely despairing like her face. She cleared the table quietly. She had nothing to hope for. She did not know she had nothing to hope for. Whatever happened she would go quietly on doing things ... in the twilight ... on a sort of edge. People would die. Perhaps people had already died in her family. But she would always be the same. One day she would die, perhaps of something hard and slow and painful with that small yellowish constitution. She would not be able to go on looking serene and despairing with people round her bed helping her. When she died she would wait quietly with nothing to do, blind and wondering. Death would take her into a great festival--things for her for herself. She would not believe it and would put up her hands to keep it off. But it would be all round her in great laughter, like the deep roaring and crying of a flood. Then she would cry like a child. Why was it that for some people, for herself, life could be happy now. It was possible now to hear things laugh just by setting your teeth and doing things; breaking into things, chucking things about, refusing to be held. It made even the dreadful past seem wonderful. All the days here, the awful days, each one awful and hateful and painful. Flora had gathered up her tray and disappeared, quietly closing the door. But Flora had known and somehow shared her triumph, felt her position in the school as she stood planted and happy in the middle of the Pernes’ hearthrug. 3 “An island is a piece of land entirely surrounded by water.” Miriam kept automatically repeating these words to herself as the newly returned children clung about her the next morning in the schoolroom. It was a morning of heavy wind and rain and the schoolroom was dark, and chilly with its summer-screened fireplace. The children seemed to her for the first time small and pathetic. She was deserting them. After fifteen months of strange intimacy she was going away for ever. During the usual routine days the little girls always seemed large and formidable. She was quite sure they were not so to the other teachers, and she hesitated when she thought over this difference, between the explanation which accounted for their size and redoubtableness by her own feebleness and the one to which she inclined when she felt her success as a teacher.