CHAPTER XV

'SO EARLY IN THE MORNING'

So she took stock of such things as, whatever befell, she felt that she would have a right to take away with her from Cloverlea; it seemed to her that, since God had opened her eyes to her actual situation, He would forgive her for undertaking, on the Sabbath evening, what He had shown her was a work of necessity. A pathetic business that stocktaking was, and a queer one, and not a very heavy one either.

She began with the money. She concluded that such cash as her father had given her for her own separate and private use she might still call her own, and use as her own. Had she been dealing with a sum of any magnitude she would have hesitated; for this young woman was a Don Quixote in petticoats, and would rather starve than eat food which she even fancied belonged to others; but she was not dealing with a sum of any magnitude. Her father had always made her a generous allowance, of which she had always made a generous use; regarding herself as, in a sense, her father's almoner, she used far the larger part of it in works of charity. Since she left school it had been his custom to give her, four times a year, a sum of one hundred and twenty-five pounds, always in gold. It had been one of his peculiarities that he had never given her either cheques or bank-notes, but always sovereigns. One of the quarterly sums had always been handed to her during the first week in April; she had been expecting it when her father had been taken