ak now? Oh! my dear, our hearts are close together to-night; and in
all your life, you will never have any one who will listen with greater
sympathy than I will, or deal more tenderly with your fault, whatever it
may have been. Tell me, dear! Dear!' she whispered after a pause,
during which she realised the depth of the girl's emotion by her
convulsive struggling to keep herself in check.

All at once the tortured girl seemed to yield herself, and slipped
inertly from her grasp till kneeling down she laid her head in the
motherly lap and sobbed. Miss Rowly kept stroking her hair in silence.
Presently the girl looked up, and with a pang the aunt saw that her eyes
were dry. In her pain she said:

'You sob like that, my child, and yet you are not crying; what is it, oh!
my dear one? What is it that hurts you so that you cannot cry?'

And then the bitter sobbing broke out again, but still alas! without
tears. Crouching low, and still enclosing her aunt's waist with her
outstretched arms and hiding her head in her breast; she said:

'Oh! Auntie, I have sent Harold away!'

'What, my dear? What?' said the old lady astonished. 'Why, I thought
there was no one in the world that you trusted so much as Harold!'

'It is true. There was--there is no one except you whom I trust so much.
But I mistook something he said. I was in a blind fury at the time, and
I said things that I thought my father's daughter never could have said.
And she never thought them, even then! Oh, Auntie, I drove him away with
all the horrible things I could say that would wound him. And all
because he acted in a way that I see now was the most noble and knightly
in which any man could act. He that my dear father had loved, and
honoured, and trusted as another son. He that was a real son to him, and
not a mock sop like me. I sent him away with such fierce and bitter pain
that his poor face was ashen grey, and there was woe in his eyes that
shall make woe in mine whenever I shall see them in my mind, waking or
sleeping. He, the truest friend . . . the most faithful, the most
tender, the most strong, the most unselfish! Oh! Auntie, Auntie, he just
turned and bowed and went away. And he couldn't do anything else with
the way I spoke to him; and now I shall never see him again!'

The young girl's eyes ware still dry, but the old woman's were wet. For
a few minutes she kept softly stroking the bowed heat till the sobbing
grew less and less