Hannah went to her door and listened.  She heard laughter down in the room which had been the bar but was now the office.  A cloud of tobacco smoke floated from there through the corridor.  Hannah drew it in with a sense of delicious peace.  Her lover smoked, and somehow the odor seemed to typify to her domestic happiness and mystery.  She listened long, looking often at the clock on the wall.  “She must be gone,” she thought, meaning Miss Hart.  She was almost sure that the figure which she had seen flitting under her window in the moonlight was that of the school-teacher.  Finally she could not resist the temptation any longer.  She hurried down the corridor until she reached No. 20.  She tapped and waited, then she tapped and waited again.  There was no response.  Hannah tried the door.  It was locked.  She took her chambermaid’s key and unlocked the door, looking around her fearfully.  Then she opened the door and slid in.  She locked the door behind her.  Then straight to the closet she went, and that beautiful lace robe seemed to float out towards her.  Hannah slipped off her own gown, and in a few moments she stood before the looking-glass, transformed.

She was so radiant, so pleased, that a flush came out on her thick skin; her eyes gleamed blue.  The lace gown fitted her very well.  She turned this way and that.  After all, her neck was not bad, not as white, perhaps, as Miss Farrel’s, but quite lovely in shape.  She walked glidingly across the room, looking over her shoulder at the trail of lace.  She was unspeakably happy.  She had a lover, and she was a woman in a fine gown for the first time in her life.  The gown was not her own, but she would have one like it.  She did not realize that this gown was not hers.  She was fairly radiant with the possession of her woman’s birthright, this poor farmer’s daughter, in whom the instincts of her kind were strong.  She glided across the room many times.  She surveyed herself in the glass.  Every time she looked she seemed to herself more beautiful, and there was something good and touching in this estimation of herself, for she seemed to see herself with her lover’s eyes as well as her own.

Finally she sat down in Miss Farrel’s rocker; she crossed her knees and viewed with delight the fleecy fall of lace to the floor.  Then she fell to dreaming, and her dreams were good.  In that gown of fashion she dreamed the dreams of the life to which the women of her race were born.  She dreamed of her good housewifery; she dreamed of the butter she would make; she dreamed of her husband coming home to meals all ready and well cooked.  She dreamed, underneath the other dreams, of children coming home.  She had no realization of the time she sat there.  At last she started and turned white.  She had heard a key turn in the lock.  Then Miss Farrel entered the room—­Miss Eliza Farrel, magnificent in pale gray, with a hat trimmed with roses crowning her blond head.  Hannah cowered.  She tried to speak, but only succeeded in making a sound as if she were deaf and dumb.