‘You’ve no right to speak to me like that, Lydia,’ Thyrza replied, with indignation.  The excitement and the fainting. fit had strung her nerves painfully; and, for all her repentance, the echo of applause was still very sweet in her ears.  This vehement reproach caused a little injury to her pride.  ’It doesn’t depend on you whether I go out or not.  I’m not a child, and I can take care of myself.  I haven’t done nothing wrong.’

’You have—­and you know you have!  You knew I shouldn’t have let you go near such a place.  You know how I’ve begged you not to go with Totty Nancarrow, and how you’ve promised me you wouldn’t be led into no harm.  I shall never be able to trust you again.  You are only a child!  You show it!  And in future you’ll do as I tell you!’

Thyrza caught up her hat.

‘I’m not going to stop here whilst you’re in such a bad temper,’ she said, in a trembling voice; ’you’ll find that isn’t the way to make me do as you wish.’

She stepped to the door.  Lydia, frightened, sprang forward and barred the way.

‘Go and sit down, Thyrza!’

‘Let me go!  What right have you to stop me?’

Then both were silent.  At the same moment they became aware that a common incident of Saturday night was occurring had got thus far on their way home, the wife’s shrill tongue in the street below.  A half-tipsy man and a nagging woman running over every scale of scurrility and striking every note of ingenious malice.  The man was at length worked to a pitch of frenzy, and then—­thud, thud, mingled with objurgations and shrill night-piercing yells.  Fury little short of murderous was familiar enough to dwellers in this region, but that woman’s bell-clapper tongue had struck shame into Lydia.  She could not speak another angry word.

‘Thyrza, take your hat off,’ she said quietly, moving away a little from the door.  Her cheeks burned, and she quivered in the subsidence of her temper.

Her sister did not obey, but, unable to stand longer, she went to a chair at a distance.  The uproar in the street continued for a quarter of an hour, then by degrees passed on, the voice of the woman shrieking foul abuse till remoteness stifled it.  Lydia forced herself to keep silence from good or ill; it was no use speaking the thoughts she had till morning.  Thyrza sat with her eyes fixed on vacancy; she was so miserable, her heart had sunk so low, that tears would have come had she not forced them back.  More than once of late she had known this mood, in which life lay about her barren and weary.  She was very young to suffer that oppression of the world-worn; it was the penalty she paid for her birthright of heart and mind.

By midnight they were lying side by side, but no ‘goodnight’ had passed between them.  When Thyrza’s gentle breathing told that she slept, Lydia still lay with open eyes, watching the flicker of the street lamp upon the ceiling, hearing the sounds that came of mirth or brutality in streets near and far.  She did not suffer in the same way as her sister; as soon as she had gently touched Thyrza’s unconscious hand love came upon her with its warm solace; but her trouble was deep, and she looked into the future with many doubts.