Brontes, a Thomas Hardy or so, and some old school-books.  She looked at the pictures, including a sampler worked by a deceased aunt, at the loud-ticking Swiss clock on the mantelpiece, at the higgledy-piggledy photographs there, at the new Axminster carpet, the piece of linoleum in front of the washstand, and the bad joining of the wallpaper to the left of the door.  She missed none of the details which she knew so well, with such long monotonous intimacy, and sighed.

Then she got up from the chair, and, opening a small drawer in the chest of drawers, put her hand familiarly to the back and drew forth a photograph.  She carried the photograph to the light of the candles on the mantelpiece, and gazed at it attentively, puckering her brows.  It was a portrait of Lionel Woolley.  Heaven knows by what subterfuge or lucky accident she had obtained it, for Lionel certainly had not given it to her.  She loved Lionel.  She had loved him for five years, with a love silent, blind, intense, irrational, and too elemental to be concealed.  Everyone knew of May’s passion.  Many women admired her taste; a few were shocked and puzzled by it.  All the men of her acquaintance either pitied or despised her for it.  Her father said nothing.  Her brothers were less cautious, and summed up their opinion of Lionel in the curt, scornful assertion that he showed a tendency to cheat at tennis.  But May would never hear ill of him; he was a god to her, and she could not hide her worship.  For more than a year, until lately, she had been almost sure of him, and then came a faint vague rumour concerning Lionel and May Lawton, a rumour which she had refused to take seriously.  The encounter of that afternoon, and Miss Lawton’s triumphant remark, had dazed her.  For seven hours she had existed in a kind of semi-conscious delirium, in which she could perceive nothing but the fatal fact, emerging more clearly every moment from the welter of her thoughts, that she had lost Lionel.  Lionel had proposed to May Lawton, and been accepted, just before she surprised them together; and Lionel, with a man’s excusable cowardice, had left his betrothed to announce the engagement.

She tore up the photograph, put the fragments in the grate, and set a light to them.

Her father’s step sounded on the stairs; he hesitated, and knocked sharply at her door.

‘What’s burning, May?’

‘It’s all right, father,’ she answered calmly, ’I’m only burning some papers in the fire-grate.’

‘Well, see you don’t burn the house down.’

He passed on.

Then she found a sheet of notepaper, and wrote on it in pencil, using the mantelpiece for a desk:  ‘Dear home.  Good-night, good-bye.’  She cogitated, and wrote further:  ‘Forgive me.—­MAY.’

She put the message in an envelope, and wrote on the envelope ‘Jim,’ and placed it prominently in front of the clock.  But after she had looked at it for a minute, she wrote ‘Father’ above Jim, and then ‘Herbert’ below.