Miriam detected the note that meant a trial ahead and went about her clearing with quiet swift busy sympathy. But Mr. Dolland had been a good introduction to the trying hour. Her thoughts followed his unconsciousness down to his cab. She saw the spatted boot on the footplate, the neat strong swing of the body, the dip of the hansom, the darkling face sitting inside under the shiny hat ... the room had become dreadful; empty and silent; pressed full with a dreadful atmosphere; those women from Rochester--but they always sat still. These people were making little faint fussings of movement, like the creakings of clothes in church and the same silent hostile feeling; people being obliged to be with people. There were two or three besides the figure in the chair. Mr. Hancock had got to work with silent assiduity. His face when he turned to the cabinet was disordered, separate from the room and from his work; a most curious expression. He turned again, busily. It was something in the mouth, resentful, and a bad-tempered look in the eyes; a look of discomposed youth. Of course. The aunt and cousins. Had she cut them, standing with her back to the room, or they her? She moved sideways with her bundle of cleaned instruments to the cabinet putting them all on the flap and beginning to open drawers, standing at his elbow as he stood turned away from the chair mixing a paste. "You might leave those there for the present" he murmured. She turned and went down the room between the unoccupied seated figures, keeping herself alert to respond to a greeting. They sat vacant and still. Ladies in church. Acrimonious. Querulously dressed in pretty materials and colours that would only keep fresh in the country. She went to the door lingeringly. It was so familiar. There had been all that at Babington. It was that that was in these figures straggling home from school, in pretty successful clothes, walking along the middle of the sunlit road ... _May-bell_ deah ... not balancing along the row of drain pipes nor pulling streaks of Berkshire goody through their lips. This was their next stage. When she reached the stairs she felt herself wrapped in their scorn. It was true; there was something impregnable about them. They sat inside a little fortress, letting in only certain people. But they did not know she could see everything inside the fortress, hear all their thoughts much more clearly than the things they said. To them she was a closed book. They did not want to open it. But if they had wanted to they could not have read. 2