dark menacing shadow, forbidding her, as it seemed to her, to be gay or
happy or careless. To-day the thought suddenly came to her, "That place is
going to do us harm. I hate it," and for a moment she was depressed and
uneasy; but when she came out from the Arden Gate and saw the High Street
all shining with the sun, running down the hill into glittering distance,
she was gloriously cheerful once more. There the second wonderful thing
that day happened to her. She had taken scarcely a step down the hill when
she came upon Mrs. Sampson. There was nothing wonderful about that; Mrs.
Sampson, being the wife of a Dean who was much more retiring than he
should be, was to be seen in public at all times and seasons, having to
do, as it were, the work of two rather than one. No, the wonderful thing
was that Joan suddenly realised that her terror of Mrs. Sampson--a terror
that had always been a real thorn in her flesh--was completely gone. It
was as though a charm, an Abracadabra, had been whispered over Mrs.
Sampson and she had been changed immediately into a rabbit. It had never
been Mrs. Sampson's fault that she was alarming to the young. She was a
good woman, but she was cursed with two sad burdens--a desperate shyness
and a series, unrelenting, unmitigating, mysterious, desperate, of nervous
headaches.

Her headaches were a feature of Polchester life, and those who were old
enough to understand pitied her and offered her many remedies. But the
young cannot be expected to realise that there can be anything physically
wrong with the old, and Mrs. Sampson's sharpness of manner, her terrifying
habit of rapping out a "Yes" or a "No," her gloomy view of boisterous
habits and healthy appetites, made her one most truly to be avoided.
Before to-day Joan would have willingly walked a mile out of her way to
escape her; to-day she only saw a nervous, pale-faced little woman in an
ill-fitting blue dress, for whom she could not be anything but sorry.