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little time.
    Hurriedly she unpacked her trunk, pulling out her thick skirt and coloured apron and the heavy shoes she had worn at the farm, and in ten minutes she was down in the kitchen and washing in the scullery at the back.
    Aunt Patience came in from the chicken run behind the house with some new-laid eggs in her apron, which she produced with a little smile of mystery. “I thought you’d like one for your breakfast,” she said. “I saw you were too tired to eat much last night. And I’ve saved you a spot of cream for your bread.” Her manner was normal enough this morning, and in spite of the red rims round her eyes, which bespoke an anxious night, she was obviously making an effort to be cheerful. Mary decided it was only in the presence of her husband that she went to pieces like a frightened child, and when he was away she had that same child’s aptitude for forgetting, and could seize pleasure from little situations such as this of making breakfast for Mary and boiling her an egg.
    They both avoided any reference to the night before, and Joss’s name was not mentioned. Where he had gone, and on what business, Mary neither asked nor cared; she was only too relieved to be rid of him.
    Mary could see that her aunt was eager to speak of things unconnected with her present life; she seemed afraid of any questions, so Mary spared her and plunged into a description of the last years at Helford, the strain of the bad times, and her mother’s illness and death.
    Whether Aunt Patience took it in or not she could not tell; certainly she nodded from time to time, and pursed her lips, and shook her head, and uttered little ejaculations; but it seemed to Mary that years of fear and anxiety had taken away her powers of concentration, and that some underlying terror prevented her from giving her whole interest to any conversation.
    During the morning there was the usual work of the house, and Mary was thus able to explore the inn more thoroughly.
    It was a dark, rambling place, with long passages and unexpected rooms. There was a separate entrance to the bar, at the side of the house, and, though the room was empty now, there was something heavy in the atmosphere reminiscent of the last time it was full: a lingering taste of old tobacco, the sour smell of drink, and an impression of warm, unclean humanity packed one against the other on the dark-stained benches.
    For all the unpleasant suggestion that it conjured, it was the one room in the inn that had vitality, and was not morne and drear. The other rooms appeared neglected or unused; even the parlour by the entrance porch had a solitary air, as though it were many months since an honest traveller had stepped upon the threshold and warmed his back before a glowing fire. The guest rooms upstairs were in an even worse state of repair. One was used for lumber, with boxes piled against the wall, and old horse blankets chewed and torn by families of rats or mice. In the room opposite, potatoes and turnips had been stored upon a broken-down bed.
    Mary guessed that her own small room had been in much the same condition, and that she owed it to her aunt that it was now furnished at all. Into their room, along the further passage, she did not venture. Beneath it, down a passage that ran parallel to the one above, long and in the opposite direction from the kitchen, was another room, the door of which was locked. Mary went out into the yard to look at it through the window, but there was a board nailed up against the frame, and she could not see inside.
    The house and outbuildings formed three sides of the little square that was the yard, in the centre of which was a grass bank and a drinking trough. Beyond this lay the road, a thin white ribbon that stretched on either hand to the horizon, surrounded on each side by moorland, brown and sodden from the heavy rains. Mary went out onto the road and looked about her, and as far as her eyes could see there was nothing but the black