The week passed by, and Hilary received no ill tidings from home.  Incessant occupation kept her from dwelling too much on anxious subjects:  besides, she would not have thought it exactly right, while her time and her mental powers were for so many hours per diem legally Miss Balquidder’s, to waste the one and weaken the other by what is commonly called “fretting.”  Nor, carrying this conscientious duty to a higher degree, and toward a higher Master, would she have dared to sit grieving overmuch over their dark future.  And yet it was very dark.  She pondered over what was to be done with Ascott, or whether he was still to be left to the hopeless hope of doing something for himself:  how long the little establishment at No. 15 could be kept together, or if, after Selina’s marriage, it would not be advisable to make some change that should contract expenses, and prevent this hard separation, from Monday to Saturday, between Johanna and herself.

These, with equally anxious thoughts, attacked her in crowds every day and every hour; but she had generally sufficient will to put them aside:  at least till after work was done, and they could neither stupefy nor paralyze her.  Trouble had to her been long enough familiar to have taught her its own best lesson—­that the mind can, in degree, rule itself, even as it rules the body.

Thus, in her business duties, which were principally keeping accounts; in her management of the two young people under her, and of the small domestic establishment connected with the shop, Hilary went steadily on, day after day; made no blunders in her arithmetic, no mistakes in her housekeeping.  Being new to all her responsibilities, she had to give her whole mind to them; and she did it:  and it was a blessing to her—­the sanctified blessing which rests upon labor, almost seeming to neutralize its primeval curse.

But night after night, when work was over, she sat alone at her sewing—­the only time she had for it—­and her thoughts went faster than her needle.  She turned over plan after plan, and went back upon hope after hope, that had risen and broken like waves of the sea—­nothing happening that she had expected; the only thing which had happened, or which seemed to have any permanence or reality, being two things which she had never expected at all—­Selina’s marriage, and her own engagement with Miss Balquidder.  It often happens so, in most people’s lives, until at last they learn to live on from day to day, doing each day’s duty within the day, and believing that it is a righteous as well as a tender hand which keeps the next day’s page safely folded down.