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.