run to. Besides—" She hesitated. "You don't know how helpless a girl can be in the hands of a grown-up man," she said, with resurgent bitterness. "He used to tell me I was the sort of girl who makes a man want to thrash her. He did hit me once or twice. Oh! I could have killed him!"

She stabbed the dead leaves viciously with Lettice's scissors.

"But, but—but didn't people talk?" Lettice asked.

"Yes, they did, and some of them even quarreled with my uncle about me; but you see he told every one what a bad girl I was, and in a way it wasn't a lie, and he could make people believe it, because he believed it himself. He did really believe that I'd made father leave the money to me, though I was only five when he died. Why, sometimes I even got muddled myself, and used to feel I must be all the dreadful things he said. Oh! I was miserable. You can be very, very miserable when you're seventeen, and it doesn't seem a bit funny then. I remember once I saved up my pennies and retrimmed my summer hat—I always hated the things she got for me—and made it look quite pretty. I was so pleased with it; and then when I came down she said it was unsuitable, and she made me take it off, and go to church in the horrid old brown felt I'd worn all the winter, though it was a broiling June day! I cried—I cried all the service. So to punish me, when we came out, she asked the vicar, me standing by, to change our pew, because she said she couldn't trust me so near the choir! (That was one of the things they always said, that I ran after men.) However, she was done that time, for the vicar played up like a trump. He said he'd speak to the choir, and see they didn't annoy me again; and then he turned to me and paid the dearest old-fashioned compliment about my sweet face being enough to turn any young man's head—and me in that frightful old hat and my nose swelled purple with crying!" She burst out laughing.

"But you did get away at last?"

"Yes, I did. I found a friend to help me ... but I can't talk about that." Visibly, under Lettice's eyes, her face clouded over and changed. It was a significant change: not a mere shadow falling from without, but a revolution within. The under side of her nature, black with premature grief and premature passions, slowly turned its ugliness into view.

"Did you ever hate any one?" she asked, her voice sinking and her eyes glowing as she relived the feelings she described. "Did you ever know what it was to turn sick and cold with loathing, to have the world go black, 

 Prev. P 47/255 next