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As the rain began to fall, hissing upon the leaves and grass, while the wind screamed in gusts, and the lightning flared suddenly out of the noon's night, a little figure could be seen running along the hedge, along the field track and down the lane, its mouth opened in screams that the wind and the thunder swallowed into their din.

§ 4

Susan Spray was at that moment not so much a little girl as the battlefield of two fears. One fear, the fear of the storm, had triumphed to the extent of driving her home in the teeth of the other fear that waited for her there. Her parents were not unkind, but they had no time for any discipline other than blows, and there must be discipline in a family of eight, living on nine shillings a week with bread at two shillings a loaf. As the little straw-thatched shape of the Boot cottage came darkling through the rain, with its scurry of down-driven chimney smoke, the second fear, the fear of blows, began to predominate. She realized that as it was after twelve o'clock her father might be at home, and she trembled at the thought of his anger when he heard she had forsaken her post in the field at Beggars Bush. Perhaps she would be turned away for this, and her wages lost. . . . Most certainly her father would beat her.