"Hannah—"
"Pretty love!" repeated Hannah from the pavement, "I've no patience with it," and, with her head in the air, she marched up the street.
Margaret went back to the drawing-room and threw herself down on her knees beside the sofa. "Oh, what can I do?" she cried. "If I had only some one to help me! This is what it means—this is why they want it so," she went on incoherently to herself. "Human beings are not strong enough to manage their lives alone—it is why all the mistakes are made. I must write to her at once. Oh, my dear, dear mother." She went to the writing-table on one side of the room. There was a worn-out old blotting-book, and in it a sheet of crumpled note-paper. She smoothed it, and with a wretched, spiky pen poured out her heart in a letter, and felt better for it. Her mother would understand, her mother always did, and would trust her and wait. How she wished that she had never left the farm, that she had borne Hannah's scoldings, borne anything rather than deserted the dear home of all her life. She only realized, too, now that she was away from her, that her mother was growing old—how foolish it seemed to miss any time at all with her. But Hannah was not to be borne. Day after day, week after week, since her father went she had tormented Margaret, and save by fits and starts her mother had been too well lost in her own dreams even to notice it, except, of course, when there had been scenes, and these were almost as trying to Mrs. Vincent as to Margaret. After all, she had done a wise thing, especially since Mr. Garratt had written, and her father was not coming home just yet. "It's only the beginning that is so difficult," she said to herself, "presently it will be better." She looked at the clock on the mantel-piece. The Lakemans must be safe in Scotland by this time; Hannah was on her way back to Chidhurst. She wondered whether Tom Carringford was in London, and if he had thought of her at all yesterday when he went to the house on the hill to dine—if he had looked across even once at Woodside Farm.
XXIV
It was the strangest thing to wake in the morning and to realize that she was alone, living on her own responsibility, in London; the strangest thing to walk into her sitting-room and see breakfast laid for her.
"Oh, I can't live by myself," she cried; "it's such a mad thing to do." But hundreds did it, why not she? Courage! She had started on her way through the world, and it would be better to begin at once arranging the work she meant to do. She knew the name of Mr. Farley's theatre; she wondered if it would be better to go and see him rather than to write. It was so difficult to explain things in a letter, and she had learned already that to get to any place she didn't know in London it was only necessary to take a cab and to pay the man at the end of the journey.
She was too impatient to wait long, and it was only eleven o'clock when she inquired for Mr. Farley at the box-office of the theatre, and was directed to go to the stage door. The stage door was down a court, ugly and narrow; the door-keeper, in a little office on the right, inquired her business. Her name was written on a slip of paper and sent up to Mr. Farley, and after she had waited some minutes in an ill-kept passage a boy came and asked her to follow him—across the stage, that looked like a staring desert, and past the scenery leaning against the walls, lath and canvas and card-board and crude colors that brought home to her uncomfortably the realities of the life she was seeking; up a little staircase and into a comfortable, well-furnished room, hung with signed portraits of celebrities. Mr. Farley came forward to meet her; he shook hands and looked at her approvingly, for he had already divined the object of her visit.
"And what did Miss—Miss Hannah was it—say to this scheme?" he asked, with a smile, when she had stated her ambitions.