“How came you to meet him?”

No answer.

“Sophia, you heard what I said!”

Still no answer.  Sophia looked down at the table. ("She can’t kill me.”)

“If you are going to be sullen, I shall have to suppose the worst,” said Mrs. Baines.

Sophia kept her silence.

“Of course,” Mrs. Baines resumed, “if you choose to be wicked, neither your mother nor any one else can stop you.  There are certain things I can do, and these I shall do ...  Let me warn you that young Scales is a thoroughly bad lot.  I know all about him.  He has been living a wild life abroad, and if it hadn’t been that his uncle is a partner in Birkinshaws, they would never have taken him on again.”  A pause.  “I hope that one day you will be a happy wife, but you are much too young yet to be meeting young men, and nothing would ever induce me to let you have anything to do with this Scales.  I won’t have it.  In future you are not to go out alone.  You understand me?”

Sophia kept silence.

“I hope you will be in a better frame of mind to-morrow.  I can only hope so.  But if you aren’t, I shall take very severe measures.  You think you can defy me.  But you never were more mistaken in your life.  I don’t want to see any more of you now.  Go and tell Mr. Povey; and call Maggie for the fresh tea.  You make me almost glad that your father died even as he did.  He has, at any rate, been spared this.”

Those words ‘died even as he did’ achieved the intimidation of Sophia.  They seemed to indicate that Mrs. Baines, though she had magnanimously never mentioned the subject to Sophia, knew exactly how the old man had died.  Sophia escaped from the room in fear, cowed.  Nevertheless, her thought was, “She hasn’t killed me.  I made up my mind I wouldn’t talk, and I didn’t.”

In the evening, as she sat in the shop primly and sternly sewing at hats—­while her mother wept in secret on the first floor, and Constance remained hidden on the second—­Sophia lived over again the scene at the old shaft; but she lived it differently, admitting that she had been wrong, guessing by instinct that she had shown a foolish mistrust of love.  As she sat in the shop, she adopted just the right attitude and said just the right things.  Instead of being a silly baby she was an accomplished and dazzling woman, then.  When customers came in, and the young lady assistants unobtrusively turned higher the central gas, according to the regime of the shop, it was really extraordinary that they could not read in the heart of the beautiful Miss Baines the words which blazed there; “You’re the finest girl I ever met,” and “I shall write to you.”  The young lady assistants had their notions as to both Constance and Sophia, but the truth, at least as regarded Sophia, was beyond the flight of their imaginations.  When eight o’clock struck and she gave the formal order for dust-sheets, the shop being empty, they never supposed that she was dreaming about posts and plotting how to get hold of the morning’s letters before Mr. Povey.