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A notion went through Nessie’s mind that she should have given a last tip to the chore boy. The incongruity of tipping John for risking his life to save her the obscenity of mob violence did not strike her. The thought vanished instantly in the feeling of terror and helplessness which rushed upon her and snuffed out the last remnants of her courage and hope.

The girl sat with a beating heart, listening now with screwed-up attention to every sound in the street. A noise caught her by the throat. She looked out of her window at a long angle and saw it was a motor car. She was so nervous she could hardly endure to remain in the bare, dismantled room, and yet she dared not show herself on the street.

"Oh Lord! Lord!" she prayed incoherently. "Have mercy on me!"

The ticking of her clock called her attention to the flight of time. She stared at its round face, tried to control herself and think. The whitecaps would not come until night, midnight. She had planned to do something. She sat looking at the clock thinking intently, biting her under lip, trying to recollect what she had meant to do. She seemed on the verge of recapturing the plan, when the vision of the whitecaps chivvying her along the streets, down the road and out of town, as they had done the others . . . those others . . . She sickened at the inclusion of herself in this term; and for the first time in her life there dawned upon her the possibility that those others, the women whom the men of the neighbourhood had misused and then thrust contemptuously forth, had been, like herself, human beings, who grew hot and cold, felt shame and bruises . . . were women. . . .

As she sat peering out of her window, weeping as silently as she could, she received a hint of something grotesquely stolid and cruel in village existence—the "nice" folk, the church members; there was a mechanical, unimaginative quality to their functioning that inflicted ghastly wounds of which they knew nothing.