of her father and her mother; and she comprehended that her destiny could not be broken off suddenly from theirs.  She was touched because her mother deemed her father a very wise man, whereas she, Audrey, knew that he was nothing of the sort.  She felt sorry for both of them.  She pitied her father, and she was a mother to her mother.  Their relations together, and the mystic posthumous spell of her father over her mother, impressed her profoundly....  And she was proud of herself for having demonstrated her courage by preventing the solicitor from running away, and extraordinarily ashamed of her sentimental and brazen behaviour to the solicitor afterwards.  These various thoughts mitigated her despair as she gazed at the sinking candle.  Nevertheless her dream was annihilated.

CHAPTER VI

THE YOUNG WIDOW

It was early October.  Audrey stood at the garden door of Flank Hall.

The estuary, in all the colours of unsettled, mild, bright weather, lay at her feet beneath a high arch of changing blue and white.  The capricious wind moved in her hair, moved in the rich grasses of the sea-wall, bent at a curtseying angle the red-sailed barges, put caps on the waves in the middle distance, and drew out into long horizontal scarves the smoke of faint steamers in the offing.

Audrey was dressed in black, but her raiment had obviously not been fashioned in the village, nor even at Colchester, nor yet at Ipswich, that great and stylish city.  She looked older; she certainly had acquired something of an air of knowledge, assurance, domination, sauciness and challenge, which qualities were all partly illustrated in her large, audacious hat.  The spirit which the late Mr. Moze had so successfully suppressed was at length coming to the surface for all beholders to see, and the process of evolution begun at the moment when Audrey had bounced up and prevented an authoritative solicitor from leaving the study was already advanced.  Nevertheless, at frequent intervals Audrey’s eyes changed, and she seemed for an instant to be a very naive, very ingenuous and wistful little thing—­and this though she had reached the age of twenty.  Perhaps she was feeling sorry for the girl she used to be.

And no doubt she was also thinking of her mother, who had died within eight hours of their nocturnal interview.  The death of Mrs. Moze surprised everyone, except possibly Mrs. Moze.  As an unsuspected result of the operation upon her, an embolism had been wandering in her veins; it reached the brain, and she expired, to the great loss of the National Reformation Society.  Such was the brief and simple history.  When Audrey stood by the body, she had felt that if it could have saved her mother she would have enriched the National Reformation Society with all she possessed.

Gradually the sense of freedom had grown paramount in her, and she had undertaken the enterprise of completely subduing Mr. Foulger to her own ends.