While Joy battled with her sorrow during the days following Preston
Cheney's burial, she woke to the consciousness that her history was
known in Beryngford. The indescribable change in the manner of her
acquaintances, the curiosity in the eyes of some, the insolence or
familiarity of others, all told her that her fears were realised; and
then there came a letter from the church authorities requesting her
to resign her position as organist.
This letter came to the young girl on one of those dreary autumn
nights when all the desolation of the dying summer, and none of the
exhilaration of the approaching winter, is in the air. She had been
labouring all day under a cloud of depression which hovered over her
heart and brain and threatened to wholly envelop her; and the letter
from the church committee cut her heart like a poniard stroke.
Sometimes we are able to bear a series of great disasters with
courage and equanimity, while we utterly collapse under some slight
misfortune. Joy had been a heroine in her great sorrows, but now in
the undeserved loss of her position as church organist, she felt
herself unable longer to cope with Fate.
"There's no place for me anywhere," she said to herself. Had she
known the truth, that the Baroness had represented her to the
committee as a fallen woman of the metropolis, who had left the city
for the city's good, the letter would not have seemed to her so
cruelly unjust and unjustifiable.
Bitter as had been her suffering at the loss of Arthur Stuart from
her life, she had found it possible to understand his hesitation to
make her his wife. With his fine sense of family pride, and his
reverence for the estate of matrimony, his belief in heredity, it
seemed quite natural to her that he should be shocked at the
knowledge of the conditions under which she was born; and the thought
that her disappearance from his life was helping him to solve a
painful problem, had at times, before this unexpected sight of him,
rendered her almost happy in her lonely exile. She had grown
strangely fond of Beryngford--of the old streets and homes which she
knew must have been familiar to her mother's eyes, of the new church
whose glorious voiced organ gave her so many hours of comfort and
relief of soul, of the tiny apartment where she and her heart
communed together. She was catlike in her love of places, and now
she must tear herself away from all these surroundings and seek some
new spot wherein to hide herself and her sorrows.