Reasoning so, he did his daily work and lived waiting.

Then came the day which put a term to the mere blank of desolation, and excited new hopes, new fears.  Thyrza’s letter arrived.  It was delivered in the afternoon, and Lydia found it pushed under her door when she returned from work.  She listened for Gilbert’s coming home, then ran down to the sitting-room, and, without speaking, put the letter into his hand.  Mrs. Grail was present.

‘I knew it had come,’ she said, in her low voice, which of late had begun to quaver with the feebleness of age.  ’Mrs. Jarmey brought it here to show me, because she guessed who it was from.’

Gilbert said very few words, and when he returned the letter, Lydia went upstairs with it, to nurse the treasure in solitude.  It lay on her lap, and again and again she read it through.  Every word she probed for meanings, every stroke of the pen she dwelt on as possibly revealing something.  ’I have been poorly, dear, but I am quite well again now.’  That sentence was the one her eye always turned to.  The writing was not quite the same as Thyrza’s used to be; it showed weakness, she thought.  She had foreseen this, that Thyrza would fall ill; in fear of that she had deprived herself of all save the barest necessaries, that she might save a little money.  But strangers had tended her sister, and with her gladness at receiving news mingled jealousy of the hands that had been preferred to her own.  Only now the bitterness of separation seemed to be tasted to the full.

At half-past nine she went downstairs again, knowing that she would find Gilbert alone.  He was sitting unoccupied, as always now in the evenings, for his books gathered dust on the unregarded shelves.  Seeing that she had the letter with her, he held out his hand for it in silence.

‘There’s one thing I’m afraid of,’ Lydia began, when she had glanced at him once or twice.  ’Do you think it’s friends of his that she’s with?’

He shook his head.

‘He would have told me if he’d found her.’

‘Are you quite sure?’

’Yes, I am sure.  He wouldn’t have said where she was, very likely, but he’d tell us that she was found.’

Gilbert had reason to think of Lydia as a great power on his side.  The girl was now implacable against Egremont.  She had ceased to utter her thoughts about him, since she knew that they pained her friend, but in her heart she kept a determined enmity.  The fact of Thyrza’s love in no way influenced her:  her imagination was not strong enough to enable her to put herself in Thyrza’s place and see Egremont as her sister saw him.  With the narrowness of view which is common enough in good and warm-hearted women, she could only regard him as the disturber of happiness, the ruin of Thyrza’s prospects.  Lydia was not ambitious; she had never been enthusiastic about Gilbert’s promotion to the librarianship, and doubtless it would have