She pressed her throbbing head on the cool stones of the well-curb and prayed for light.  What could she do—­where could she go?  Her fate rose up before her like a great stone prison wall at which she beat with naked bleeding hand and the stones still stood in all their mightiness.

How could she cope with such heartless cruelty as that of Sanderson?  All that she had asked for was an honest roof in return for honest toil.  And there are so few such, thought the helpless girl, remembering with awful vividness her efforts to find work and the pitfalls and barriers that had been put in her way, often in the guise of friendly interest.

She could not go out and face it all over again.  It was so bleak—­so bleak.  There seemed to be no place in the great world that she could fill, no one stood in need of her help, no one required her services.  They had no faith in her story that she was looking for work and had no home.

“What, a good-looking young girl like you!  What, no home?  No, no; we don’t need you,” or the other frightful alternative.

And yet she must go.  Sanderson was right.  She could not stay where he was.  She must go.  But where?

She could hear his voice in the dining-room, entertaining them all with his inimitable gift of story-telling.  And then, their laughter—­peal on peal of it—­and his voice cutting in, with its well-bred modulation:  “Yes, I thought it was a pretty good story myself, even if the joke was on me.”  And again their laughter and applause.  She had no weapons with which to fight such cold-blooded selfishness.  To stay meant eternal torture.  She saw herself forced to face his complacent sneer day after day and death on the roadside seemed preferable.

She tried to face the situation in all its pitiful reality, but the injustice of it cried out for vengeance and she could not think.  She could only bury her throbbing temples in her hands and murmur over and over again:  “It is all wrong.”

David found her thus, as he made his way to the house from the barn, where he had been detained later than the others.  When he saw her forlorn little figure huddled by the well-curb in an attitude of absolute dejection, he could not go on without saying some word of comfort.

“Miss Anna,” he said very gently, “I hope you are not going to be homesick with us.”

She lifted a pale, tear-stained face, on which the lines of suffering were written far in advance of her years.

“It does not matter, Mr. David,” she answered him, “I am going away.”

“No, no, you are not going to do anything of the kind,” he said gently; “the work seems hard today because it is new, but in a day or two you will become accustomed to it, and to us.  We may seem a bit hard and unsympathetic; I can see you are not used to our ways of living, and looking at things, but we are sincere, and we want you to stay with us; indeed, we do.”