canvas of the tent, which is the veil concealing the lives of all of us, she did not trouble to ask herself. Like the circus performers, they would be here to-day and to-morrow their goods and chattels would be packed, the naphtha flares beneath whose light they had for a moment appeared would be extinguished. Only the bare ring over which their horses had pranced would remain in Hannah's mind to show where they had been. And in Hannah's mind the grass would soon grow again to blot it out of sight.

To Hannah Throgmorton, these advents and excursions were no more than this.

IV

Somehow they knew in Bridnorth that Jane was thirty-six. She hid her gray beneath the careful combing of her back hair.

There is a different attitude of mind in the woman who hides these things successfully and her who still hides but knows that she fails. Sharp antagonism and resentment, this is the mind of the latter. Not only does she know that she fails. She knows how others realize that she has tried. Yet something still urges in her purpose.

Jane knew she failed. That was bitter enough. But the greater bitterness lay in the knowledge that had she succeeded it would have been of no avail. For some years, unlike her sister Hannah, she had relinquished hope, flung it aside in all consciousness of loss; flung it aside and often looked her God in the face with the accusing glances of unconcealed reproach.

To Jane that coming of the coach was the reminding spur that pricked her memories to resentment. No Destiny for her was to be found in the freight it carried. For each passenger as they descended outside the Royal George, she had her caustic comment. Hers was the common but forgivably ungenerous spirit, of the critic in whose breast the milk of human kindness has grown sour from standing overlong in the idleness of impotent ability.

Yet reminding spur that it was, and deeply as it hurt her, her eyes were as swift and sharp as any to take note of the new arrivals. Perhaps it was the very pain that she cherished. Life is a texture of sensations, and if only the thread of pain be left to keep the whole together, there are many who welcome it rather than feel the bare boards beneath their feet.

Whenever a man, strange to them amongst the regular visitors to Bridnorth, slipped off the coach at the Royal George, she knew his arrival meant nothing in Destiny to her. Yet often she would be the first to pick him out.

"He's new. Wonder if he's come with the Tollursts."

And having taken him in with a swiftness of apprehension, her glances would shoot from Fanny to Mary and back again as though she could steal the secrets of Fate out of their eyes.

It was Fanny she read most easily of all; Fanny who in such moments revealed to the shrewdness of her gaze that faint acceleration of pulse, to the realization of which nothing but the bitterness in her heart could have sharpened her. It was upon Fanny then in these moments her observation concentrated. Mary eluded her. Indeed Mary, it seemed, was the calmest and serenest of them all. Sometimes if she were engrossed in reading she did not even come to the window, but was content from her chair to hear what they had to report.

And when there were no visitors descending from the coach, in language their brother had long brought home from school and left behind him in phrases when he went, it was Jane, with a laugh, who turned upon those other three and said--

"What a suck for everybody!"

V

Then there was Fanny, whose age in Bridnorth was variously guessed to be between thirty and thirty-three. No one knew. Her sisters never revealed it. Jane had her loyalties and this was one.

Only Fanny herself, in those quiet moments when a woman is alone before the judgment of her own mirror, knew that the gray hairs had begun to make their appearance amidst the black. They were not even for concealment yet. It was as though they tried to hide themselves from the swift searching of her eyes. But she had found them out. Each one as pensively she rolled it round her fingers, hiding it away or burning it in the fire, was a thorn that pricked and drew blood.

Hope had not yet been laid aside by her. In that vivid if untrained imagination of hers, Romance still offered her promise of the untold joys and ecstasies of a woman's heart. She had not laid Hope aside, but frettingly and constantly Hope was with her. She was conscious of it, as of a hidden pain that warns of some disease only the knife can cure.

Always she was clutching it and only the writing of her ill-measured verses of poetry could anesthetize her knowledge of its presence. Then, when she was beating out her fancies in those uncomely words of almost childish verse, the pain of the hope she had would lie still, soothed to sleepfulness by the soporific of her wandering imagination.

What, can it be supposed, was the coming of the coach to her?

The vehicle of Fate it has been said it was, bringing a Destiny which for thirty years and more had lingered on its journey, for never had it been set down at the Royal George.

Already she knew that she was tired of waiting for it. Often that tiredness overcame her. Through the long winter months when the Bridnorth stream was languid and shallow in its flow, she became listless when she was not irritable, and the look of those thirty-three years was added in their fullness in her eyes.

A visit into the world amongst those friends they had, transitory though those visits may have been, revived courage in her. And all through the Spring and Summer season, she fought that fatigue as a woman must and will so long as the hope of Romance has even one red spark of fire in her heart.

It was not a man so much she wanted, as Romance. She alone could have told what was meant by that. The one man she had known had almost made her hate his sex. It was not so much to her a stranger who stepped down outside the Royal George and trod her pulse to acceleration, as the urgent wonder of what might happen in the weeks to come; of what might happen to her in the very core of her being. He was no more than a medium, an instrument to bring about those happenings. She knew in herself what ecstasy she could suffer, how her heart could throb behind her wasted breast, how every vein threading her body would become the channel for a warmer race of blood.

It was not so much that she wanted a man to love as to feel love itself with all its accompanying sensations of fear and wonder, yet knowing all the time that before these emotions could happen to her, she must attract and be found acceptable, must in another waken some strange need to be the kindling spark in her.

Only once had it seemed she had succeeded. There had come a visitor to the Royal George with whom in the ordinary course of the summer life of Bridnorth, acquaintance had soon been made. None of them were slow to realize the interest he had taken in Fanny. Before he left they twice had walked over the moors to where on the highest and loneliest point of the cliffs you can see the whole sweep of Bridnorth bay and in