Then came a series of Mrs. Hungerford--all the volumes she had not already read. She read them eagerly, inspirited. The gabled country houses, the sunlit twilit endless gardens, the deep orchards, the falling of dew, the mists of the summer mornings, masses of flowers in large rooms with carved oaken furniture, wide staircases with huge painted windows throwing down strange patches of light on shallow thickly carpetted stairs. These were the things she wanted; gay house-parties, people with beautiful wavering complexions and masses of shimmering hair catching the light, fragrant filmy diaphanous dresses; these were the people to whom she belonged--a year or two of life like that, dancing and singing in and out the houses and gardens; and then marriage. Living alone, sadly estranged, in the house of a husband who loved her and with whom she was in love, both of them thinking that the other had married because they had lost their way in a thunderstorm or spent the night sitting up on a mountain-top or because of a clause in a will, and then one day both finding out the truth.... That is what is meant by happiness ... happiness. But these things could only happen to people with money. She would never have even the smallest share of that sort of life. She might get into it as a governess--some of Mrs. Hungerford’s heroines were governesses--but they had clouds of hair and were pathetically slender and appealing in their deep mourning. She read volume after volume, forgetting the titles--the single word ‘Hungerford’ on a cover inflamed her. Her days became an irrelevance and her evenings a dreamy sunlit indulgence. Now and again she wondered what Julia Doyle would think if she knew what she was reading and how it affected her--whether she would still watch her in the way she did as she went about her work pale and tired, whether she would go on guarding her so fiercely? 9