There were days of desolation for Nell Beatup that November. Her disappointment gripped her as a black frost grips the fields; she felt powerless, bound, and sterile. Even the last month, when bit by bit her happy memories were destroyed, when she learned that all her [217] hopes were built on an exaggeration, a mistake, even that month of slow disillusion had been better than this black month of despair. In October a few crumpled leaves had reddened the trees, a few pale draggled flowers had sweetened the garden, a bird had sometimes perched on the gable end and sung before he flew away. But now the fields were black and the woods were dun, the lanes were a poach of mud, and the smell of mud hung above field-gates and barns—a clammy mist rose from the ponds, making the air substantial with the taste of water ... tears ... they seemed to hang in the rainy clouds, to dribble from the trodden earth, and, mixed with the dead summer’s dust, they made a grey slimy mud that sobbed and sucked under her feet on her daily trudge to school.

The killing of her hope was no mercy. Even that sick thing had been better than this emptiness, this death. Hope had sustained her for years, for years she had had nothing more robust to feed on than her pale infatuation for a man who seldom gave her crumbs. She had become skilled in hoping, long practice made her an experienced artificer of hope, able to build a palace out of a few broken bricks. She had never known any other love than this ghost of one, so there had never been a chance of its dying of comparison. She had no intimate girl friends, and Ivy’s full-blooded affairs struck her only with the grossness of their quality, giving her own by contrast a refinement and poetry that made it doubly precious.

Then had come the wonderland of those harvest days, when hope had almost passed into confidence, when all the wonderful things of love she had never learned yet—glamour, pride, perfection, satisfaction—had shown her their burning shapes. But it had all been false, a mirage of that same hope’s sick intensity, an overreaching of the artificer’s skill; and now her tears had turned to [218] mud the golden dust of harvest, and all her dreams were dead—and stuck to her still, clogging and fouling, like this mud of Slivericks Lane on her boots.

Luckily, her day-long absence made it possible for her to hide her wretchedness from her family. At school her listlessness was commented on—a listlessness alternating with an increased nerviness and a tendency to cry when found fault with—but as Nell had always been a little languid and a little hysterical, these exaggerations of her natural state were put down to her health, and the schoolmistress persuaded her to take a patent medicine containing iron. Her love affair had been conducted on such delicate lines that only a few had noticed it, and no one except Ivy had given it any importance. Ivy was intensely sorry for her sister, and on one Sunday’s visit dared to probe her state. But Nell was like a poor little cat caught by the tail, and could only scratch and spit, so Ivy good-naturedly gave up the effort. She was quite her old self again, judging by the “pals” she brought over to Worge on her Sundays off—Motorman Hodder and Motorman Davis, and Sergeant Staples, and Private La Haye, and Corporal Bunch of the Moose Jaws, and other Canadians quartered at Hastings, who sat in the kitchen, saying, “Sure&rdqu............