Otherwise, her days were mostly drab-coloured, the only thing that at all kept up her spirits being her untiring faith in Perigal—­a faith which, in time, became a mechanical action of mind.  Strive as she might to quell rebellious thoughts, now and again she would rage soul and body at the web that fate, or Providence, had spun about her life.  At these times, it hurt her to the quick to think that, instead of being the wife she deserved to be, she was in her present unprotected condition, with all its infinite possibilities of disaster.  Again and again the thought would recur to her that she might have been Windebank’s wife at any time that she had cared to encourage his overtures, and if she were desirable as a wife in his eyes, why not in Charlie Perigal’s!  Gregarious instincts ran in her blood.  For all her frequent love of solitude, there were days when her soul ached for the companionship of her own social kind.  This not being forthcoming-indeed (despite her faith in Perigal) there being little prospect of it—­she avoided as much as possible the sight of, or physical contact with, those prosperous ones whom she knew to be, in some cases, her equals; in most, her social inferiors.

It was at night when she was most a prey to unquiet thoughts.  Tired with her many hours’ work at the piano, she would fall into a deep sleep, with every prospect of its continuing till Mrs Scatchard would bring up her morning cup of tea, when Mavis would suddenly awaken, to remain for interminable hours in wide-eyed thought.  She would go over and over again events in her past life, more particularly those that had brought her to her present pass.  The immediate future scarcely bothered her at all, because, for the present, she was pretty sure of employment at the academy.  On the very rare occasions on which she suffered her mind to dwell on what would happen after her child was born, should Perigal not fulfil his repeated promises, her vivid imagination called up such appalling possibilities that she refused to consider them; she had enough sense to apply to her own case the wisdom contained in the words, “sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.”

In these silent watches of the night, so protracted and awesome was the quiet, that it would seem to the girl’s preternatural sensibilities as if the life of the world had come to a dead stop, and that only she and the little one within her were alive.  Then she would wonder how many other girls in London were in a like situation to hers; if they were constantly kept awake obsessed by the same fears; also, if, like her, they comforted themselves by clasping a ring which they wore suspended on their hearts—­a ring given them by the loved one, even as was hers.  Then she would fall to realising the truth of the saying, “How easily things go wrong.”  It seemed such a little time since she had been a happy girl at Melkbridge (if she had only realised how really happy she was!), with more than enough for her everyday needs, when her heart was untrammelled by love; when she was healthful, and, apart from the hours which she was compelled to spend at the office, free.  Now—­An alert movement within her was more eloquent than thought.