very tired, and for the first time she had a half-comic flash of pity for Miss Egan. The face of the nurse must at times have grown horribly tired.
The giddiness still clung to her as she climbed into the motor beside Sybil and they drove off down the lane which led from Brook Cottage to Pentlands. The road was a part of a whole tracery of lanes, bordered by hedges and old trees, which bound together the houses of the countryside, and at night they served as a promenade and meeting-place for the servants of the same big houses. One came upon them in little groups of three or four, standing by gates or stone walls, gossiping and giggling together in the darkness, exchanging tales of the life that passed in the houses of their masters, stories of what the old man did yesterday, and how Mrs. So-and-so only took one bath a week. There was a whole world which lay beneath the solid, smooth, monotonous surface that shielded the life of the wealthy, a world which in its way was full of mockery and dark secrets and petty gossip, a world perhaps fuller of truth because it lay hidden away where none—save perhaps Aunt Cassie, who knew how many fascinating secrets servants had—ever looked, and where there was small need for the sort of pretense which Olivia found so tragic. It circulated the dark lanes at night after the dinners of the neighborhood were finished, and sometimes the noisy echoes of its irreverent mockery rose in wild Irish laughter that echoed back and forth across the mist-hung meadows.
The same lanes were frequented, too, by lovers, who went in pairs instead of groups of three or four, and at times there were echoes of a different sort of merriment—the wild, half-hysterical laughter of some kitchen-maid being wooed roughly and passionately in some dark corner by a
