Emily smiled abstractedly, she was counting compresses.  She stopped long enough to ask, “Is Hilda still in town?”

“Yes.  I saw her yesterday on the other side of the street.  I didn’t speak, but some day when I get a good opportunity I am going to tell her what I think of her.”

But when the opportunity came she did not say all that she had meant to say!

She went over one morning to her father’s house to get some papers which he had left in his desk.  The house had been closed for weeks and the hall, as she entered it, was cold with a chill that reached the marrow of her bones—­it was dim with the half-gloom of drawn curtains and closed doors.  Even the rose-colored drawing-room as she stood on the threshold held no radiance—­it had the stiff and frozen look of a soulless body.  Yet she remembered how it had throbbed and thrilled on the night that Derry had come to her.  The golden air had washed in waves over her.

She shivered and went over to the window.  She pulled up a curtain and looked out upon the grayness of the street.  The clouds were low, and a strong wind was blowing.  Those who passed, bent to the wind.  She was slightly above the level of the street, and nobody looked up at her.  She might have been a ghost in the ghostly house.

Well, she had to get the papers.  She turned to face the gloom, and as she turned she heard a sound in the room above her.

It was the rather startling sound of muffled steps.  She dared not go into the hall.  She felt comparatively safe by the window—.  If—­anything came, she could open the window and call.

But she did not call, for it was Hilda who came presently on rubber-heels and stood in the door.

“I thought I heard some one,” she said, calmly.

“How did you get in?” was Jean’s abrupt demand.

“I had my key.  I have never given it up.”

“But this is no longer your home.”

“It was never home,” said Hilda, darkly.  “It was never home.  I lived here with you and your father, but it was never home.”

Jean, more than ever afraid of this woman, had a sudden sense of something tragic in the fact of Hilda’s homelessness.

“I don’t quite see what you mean,” she said, slowly.

“You couldn’t see,” Hilda told her, “and you will never see.  Women like you don’t.”

“We didn’t get on very well together,” Jean said, almost timidly, “but that was because we were different.”

“It wasn’t because we were different that we didn’t get on,” Hilda said.  “It was because you were afraid of me.  You knew your father liked me.”

With her usual frankness she spoke the truth as she saw it.

“I was not afraid,” Jean faltered.

“You were.  But we needn’t talk about that.  I am going to France.”

“When?”

“As soon as I can get there.  That’s why I came here.  To take away some things I wanted.”