Blank silence had met her when she had taken the tea tray upstairs and called softly through the closed door.

Mrs.
Coombe was probably asleep.

She would be better to-morrow; but before long she would be ill again, and the interval between the attacks was becoming shorter.
There was anger as well as anxiety in the girl's mind.

Her healthy and straightforward youth had little patience with her step-mother's unreasonable caprices.

For her illness she had every sympathy, but for the morbid nervousness which seemed to accompany it, none at all.