But soon she wearied of the small business of pottering about her clock and lamps, and, turning to the window, opened it, and, leaning upon her elbows, looked down into the square.

By now the thunderstorm was gone, like the withdrawal of a dark curtain; the sun was out again over the City.  The square, deserted but half an hour ago, was reinvaded with its little people of nurse-maids, gray-coated policemen, and loungers reading their papers on the benches near the fountain.  The elms still dripped, their wet leaves glistening again to the sun.  There was a delicious smell in the air—­a smell of warm, wet grass, of leaves and drenched bark from the trees.  On the far side of the square, seen at intervals in the spaces between the foliage, a passing truck painted vermilion set a brisk note of colour in the scene.  A newsboy appeared chanting the evening editions.  On a sudden and from somewhere close at hand an unseen hand-piano broke out into a gay, jangling quickstep, marking the time with delightful precision.

A carriage, its fine lacquered flanks gleaming in the sunlight, rolled through the square, on its way, no doubt, to the very fashionable quarter of the City just beyond.  Lloyd had a glimpse of the girl leaning back in its cushions, a girl of her own age, with whom she had some slight acquaintance.  For a moment Lloyd, ridden with her terrors, asked herself if this girl, with no capabilities for either great happiness or great sorrow, were not perhaps, after all, happier than she.  But she recoiled instantly, murmuring to herself with a certain fierce energy: 

“No, no; after all, I have lived.”

And how had she lived?  For the moment Lloyd was willing to compare herself with the girl in the landau.  Swiftly she ran over her own life from the time when left an orphan; in the year of her majority she had become her own mistress and the mistress of the Searight estate.  But even at that time she had long since broken away from the conventional world she had known.  Lloyd was a nurse in the great St Luke’s Hospital even then, had been a probationer there at the time of her mother’s death, six months before.  She had always been ambitious, but vaguely so, having no determined object in view.  She recalled how at that time she knew only that she was in love with her work, her chosen profession, and was accounted the best operating nurse in the ward.

She remembered, too, the various steps of her advancement, the positions she had occupied; probationer first, then full member of the active corps, next operating nurse, then ward manager, and, after her graduation, head nurse of ward four, where the maternity cases were treated.  Then had come the time when she had left the hospital and practised private nursing by herself, and at last, not so long ago, the day when her Idea had so abruptly occurred to her; when her ambition, no longer vague, no longer personal, had crystallised and taken shape; when she had discovered