III

There was an impatient knock at the front door,--rare phenomenon, but
not unknown.

Mrs. Lessways cried out thickly from the folds of her flannel petticoat:

"Hilda, just see who that is, will you?... knocking like that! Florrie
can't come."

And just as Hilda reached the front door, her mother opened the kitchen
door wide, to view the troublesome disturber and to inform him, if as
was probable he was exceeding his rights, that he would have done better
to try the back door.

It was Mr. Cannon at the front door.

Hilda heard the kitchen door slammed to behind her, but the noise was
like a hallucination in her brain. She was staggered by the apparition
of Mr. Cannon in the porch. She had vaguely wondered what he might do to
execute his promise of aid; she had felt that time was running short if
her mother was to be prevented from commencing rent-collector on the
Monday; she had perhaps ingenuously expected from him some kind of
miracle; but of a surety she had never dreamed that he would call in
person at her home. "He must be mad!" she would have exclaimed to
herself, if the grandeur of his image in her heart had not made any such
accusation impossible to her. He was not mad; he was merely inscrutable,
terrifyingly so. It was as if her adventurous audacity, personified, had
doubled back on her, and was exquisitely threatening her.