The girl was profoundly astonished. "A lodging?" she cried, sitting up. "For us?"
"Yes," the mother answered coldly. "For whom do you think?"
"And you will leave this house?"
"Yes."
"But when?"
"To-night."
"Leave this house—for a lodging—to-night?" the girl faltered. She could not believe her ears. "Why? What has happened?"
Then the woman, in the fierceness of her mood, turned her arms against her child. "Need you ask?" she cried bitterly. "Do you want to go on living in this house—in this house, which was your father's? To go in and out at this door, and meet our neighbours and talk with them on these steps? To wait here—here, where every one knows you, for the shame that will come? For the man who will never come?"
The girl sank back, shuddering and weeping. The woman covered her head and went out, and presently returned; and in the grey of the evening, which within the walls fell early, the two left the house, the elder carrying a bundle of clothes, the younger whimpering and wondering. Stupefied by the suddenness of the movement, and her mother's stern purpose, she did not observe that they had left the door on the latch, and the House on the Wall unguarded.
The people with whom they had found a lodging, a little room under the sharply sloping tiles, knew them by name and sight—that in so small a place was inevitable—but found nothing strange in the woman's reason for moving; she said that at home the firing broke her daughter's rest. The housewife indeed could sympathize with her, and did so. "I never go to bed myself," she said roundly, "but I dream of those wretches sacking the town, and look to awake with my throat cut."