nto her cosy bedroom.

The walls of that quaint, low-roofed apartment were gay with oleographs,
several being scenes from _Faust_, and one, which Anna had had given to
her nearly forty years ago, showed the immortal Charlotte, still cutting
bread and butter.

On the dressing-table, one at each end, were a pair of white china busts
of Bismarck and von Moltke. Anna had brought these back from Berlin
three years before. Of late she had sometimes wondered whether it would
be well to put them away in one of the three large, roomy cupboards
built into the wall behind her bed. One of these cupboards already
contained several securely packed parcels which, as had been
particularly impressed on Anna, must on no account be disturbed, but
there was plenty of room in the two others. Still, no one ever came into
her oddly situated bedroom, and so she left her heroes where they were.

After taking off her things, she extracted the two-shilling piece out of
the pocket where it had lain loosely, and added it to the growing store
of silver in the old-fashioned tin box where she kept her money. Then
she put on her apron and hurried out, with the cheese and the butter in
her hands, to the beautifully arranged, exquisitely clean meat safe,
which had been cleverly fixed to one of the windows of the scullery soon
after her arrival at the Trellis House.

The next morning Mrs. Otway came home, and within an hour of her arrival
the mother and daughter had told one another their respective secrets.
The revelation came about as such things have a way of coming about when
two people, while caring deeply for one another, are yet for the moment
out of touch with each other's deepest feelings. It came about, that is
to say, by a chance word uttered in entire ignorance of the real state
of the case.

Rose, on hearing of her mother's expedition to Arlington Street, had
shown surprise, even a little vexation: "You've gone and tired yourself
out for nothing--a letter would have done quite as well!"

And, as her mother made no answer, the girl, seeing as if for the first
time how sad, how worn, that same dear mother's face now looked, came
close up to her and whispered, "I think, mother--forgive me if I'm
wrong--that you care for Major Guthrie as I care for Jervis Blake."

CHAPTER XXII

The days that followed Mrs. Otway's journey to London, the easy earning
by good old Anna of a florin for Alfred Head's brief sight of Jervis
Blake's lette