The scene did not endorse their hopeful reading of the situation.  Before them stretched the avenue, confined on each side by palings with rounded tops which looked like slurs on a score of music; to the right the hospital lay behind a flatness of grass, planted in places with shrubs; and to the left, on the slope of the hill on which the grey workhouse stood, painted the very grey colour of poverty itself, paupers in white overalls worked among bare trees.  Through this grim landscape they stepped forward, silent and hand in hand, grieving because she had lived without glory, she who was so much loved by them, whose life was going to be so glorious.

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER I

Now that they had taken the tickets at Willesden, Ellen felt doubtful of the whole enterprise.  It was very possible that Richard’s mother would not want her.  In fact, she had been sure that Richard’s mother did not want her ever since they left Crewe.  There a fat, pasty young man had got in and taken the seat opposite her, and had sat with his pale grey eyes dwelling on the flying landscape with a slightly sick, devotional expression, while his lips moved and his plump hands played with a small cross inscribed “All for Jesus” which hung from his watch-chain.  Presently he had settled down to rest with his hands folded on his lap, but had shortly been visited with a distressing hiccup, which shook his waistcoat so violently that the little cross was sent flying up into the air.  “Mother will laugh when I tell her about that,” she said to herself, and did not remember for a second that her mother had been dead six weeks.

This sharp reminder of the way they had conspired together to cover the blank wall of daily life with a trellis of trivial laughter made her stare under knitted brows at the companionship that was to be hers henceforward.  It could not be as good as that.  Indeed, from such slender intimations as she had received, it was not going to be good at all.  Her inflexibly honest aesthetic sense had made her lay by Mrs. Yaverland’s letters with the few trinkets and papers she desired to keep for ever, because they were written in such an exquisite script, each black word written so finely and placed so fastidiously on the thick, rough, white paper, and she felt it a duty to do honour to all lovely things.  But their contents had increased her sense of bereavement.  They had come like a north wind blowing into a room that is already cold.  She had not wished to find them so, for she disliked becoming so nearly the subject of a comic song as a woman who hates her mother-in-law.  But it was really the fact that they had the air of letters written by someone who was sceptical of the very existence of the addressee and had sent them merely to humour some third person.  And where the expressions were strong she felt that they were qualified by their own