Aunt Janet watched the girl as though she could not believe in anything so sincere as this love of sweet things.  Then she said a little sadly: 

“There’s not a thing on earth that I want or love.”

“Because you’ve ruled yourself out of everything!  I love to want things because always they may be just round the corner.  And if they aren’t, there’s the fun of thinking they are.  And always there’s another corner after the last one.  I’d rather die of hungriness than never be hungry.”

“Oh, you’ll die of hungriness, I expect.  That is, if you’re lucky,” said Aunt Janet.  “I shall just drop out of life some day.”

Suddenly time gave a sharp leap forward and Marcella saw herself sitting there as Aunt Janet was sitting, a dead soul in a dulled body, waiting to drop out of life.  The words of Wullie and the gipsy slid into her mind—­“they go on strange roads”—­and she got a swift vision of herself in armour riding out gaily along a strange road with her knight beside her.  Elbowing that out came something she had seen that had amazed her a few days ago.  In the evenings she and Aunt Janet sat in the book-room, into which they had taken a little table of Rose’s and a few chairs.  Beside the fire-place had been one of those ancient presses in which the old farmer had kept his whisky, his pipes and his account books.  When the man from Christy’s came to buy the furniture he had noticed the beautifully carved oak doors of the press and offered such a tempting sum for them that Aunt Janet had let them go, nailing a piece of old crested tapestry across the press to hide her books and needlework inside.  They usually sat there together, Marcella reading or dreaming, Aunt Janet sewing or sitting listless, not even dreaming.  But into Marcella’s dreams had come frequent movements of her aunt’s hand going in behind the curtain.  Several times when she had spoken to her, Aunt Janet had waited a few seconds before answering, and then had spoken in a queerly muffled voice.  One day, looking in the cupboard for needle and cotton, Marcella had seen a big paper bag full of sweets—­a thing she had not seen at the farm since her mother died.  They were acid drops; she took one or two and meant to ask her aunt for some in the evening when they sat together.  But she forgot until, falling into one of her dreams and staring in the fire, she noticed her aunt take something almost slyly from the cupboard and put in her mouth behind the cover of her book, glancing at her furtively as she did so.  The amazing fact that she was eating the acid drops secretly came into her mind and she sat trying to reason it out for some minutes.

“Mean thing—­she doesn’t want me to have any,” was her first thought which she dismissed a moment later as she remembered certain very distinct occasions when her aunt had been anything but mean, times when she had deliberately stayed away from a scanty meal that the others should have more—­little sacrifices that Marcella was only just beginning to understand.