"Mrs. Edwardes's Albert, Miss, come for the Maternity bag."

"It's all ready in the school-room cupboard," Betty called through the
door. "Number three."

She resisted an impulse to say that she had broken the key in the lock
and to send for the locksmith. No: there should be no scandal at Long
Barton,--at least not while she had to stay in it.

She did not cry. She was sick with fury, and anger made her heart beat
as Vernon had never had power to make it.

"I will be calm. I won't lose my head," she told herself again and
again. She drank some water. She made herself eat the neglected
breakfast. She got out her diary and wrote in it, in a handwriting
that was not Betty's, and with a hand that shook like totter-grass.

"What will become of me? What has become of _him_? My step-father must
have done something horrible to him. Perhaps he has had him put in
prison; of course he couldn't do that in these modern times, like in
the French revolution, just for talking to some one he hadn't been
introduced to, but he may have done it for trespassing, or damage to
the crops, or something. I feel quite certain something has happened
to him. He would never have deserted me like this in my misery if he
were free. And I can do nothing to help him--nothing. How shall I live
through the day? How can I bear it? And this awful trouble has come
upon him just because he was kind to another artist. The world is
very, very, very cruel. I wish I were dead!" She blotted the words and
locked away the book. Then she burnt that farewell note and went and