She looked out upon a beautiful corner of English Lakeland.  The house in which she stood was built on the side of a little river, which, as she saw it, came flashing and sparkling out of a lake beyond, lying in broad strips of light and shade amid green surrounding fells.  The sun was slipping low, and would soon have kindled all the lake into a white fire, in which its islands would have almost disappeared.  But, for the moment, everything was plain:—­the sky, full of light, and filmy grey cloud, the fells with their mingling of wood and purple crag, the shallow reach of the river beyond the garden, with a little family of wild duck floating upon it, and just below her a vivid splash of colour, a mass of rhododendron in bloom, setting its rose-pink challenge against the cool greys and greens of the fell.

But Bridget Cookson was not admiring the view.  It was not new to her, and moreover she was not in love with Westmorland at all; and why Nelly should have chosen this particular spot, to live in, while George was at the war, she did not understand.  She believed there was some sentimental reason.  They had first seen him in the Lakes—­just before the war—­when they two girls and their father were staying actually in this very lodging-house.  But sentimental reasons are nothing.

Well, the thing was done.  Nelly was married, and in another week, George would be at the front.  Perhaps in a fortnight’s time she would be a widow.  Such things have happened often.  ’And then what shall I do with her?’ thought the sister, irritably,—­recoiling from a sudden vision of Nelly in sorrow, which seemed to threaten her own life with even greater dislocation than had happened to it already.  ’I must have my time to myself!—­freedom for what I want’—­she thought to herself, impatiently, ‘I can’t be always looking after her.’

Yet of course the fact remained that there was no one else to look after Nelly.  They had been left alone in the world for a good while now.  Their father, a Manchester cotton-broker in a small way, had died some six months before this date, leaving more debts than fortune.  The two girls had found themselves left with very small means, and had lived, of late, mainly in lodgings—­unfurnished rooms—­with some of their old furniture and household things round them.  Their father, though unsuccessful in business, had been ambitious in an old-fashioned way for his children, and they had been brought up ’as gentlefolks’—­that is to say without any trade or profession.

But their poverty had pinched them disagreeably—­especially Bridget, in whom it had produced a kind of angry resentment.  Their education had not been serious enough, in these days of competition, to enable them to make anything of teaching after their Father’s death.  Nelly’s water-colour drawing, for instance, though it was a passion with her, was quite untrained, and its results unmarketable.  Bridget had taken up one subject after another, and generally in a spirit of antagonism to her surroundings, who, according to her, were always ‘interfering’ with what she wanted to do,—­with her serious and important occupations.  But these occupations always ended by coming to nothing; so that, as Bridget was irritably aware, even Nelly had ceased to be as much in awe of them as she had once been.