ne and friendless with her great trouble,
she was so helpless, so hopeless, she was so anxious to do right, and
so fearful she had done wrong, that Miss Cotton would not have been
Miss Cotton if she had not taken her in her arms and assured her that in
everything she had done she had been sublimely and nobly right, a lesson
to all her sex in such matters for ever. She told her that she had
always admired her, but that now she idolised her; that she felt like
going down on her knees and simply worshipping her.

"Oh, don't say that, Miss Cotton!" pleaded Alice, pulling away from
her embrace, but still clinging to her with her tremulous, cold little
hands. "I can't bear it! I'm wicked and hard you don't know how bad I
am; and I'm afraid of being weak, of doing more harm yet. Oh, I wronged
him cruelly in ever letting him get engaged to me! But now what you've
said will support me. If you think I've done right--It must seem strange
to you that I should come to you with my trouble instead of my mother;
but I've been to her, and--and we think alike on so few subjects, don't
you know--"

"Yes, yes; I know, dear!" said Miss Cotton, in the tender folly of
her heart, with the satisfaction which every woman feels in being more
sufficient to another in trouble than her natural comforters.

"And I wanted to know how you saw it; and now, if you feel as you say, I
can never doubt myself again."

She tempested out of Miss Cotton's house, all tearful under the veil she
had pulled down, and as she shut the door of her coupe, Miss Cotton's
heart jumped into her throat with an impulse to run after her, to recall
her, to recant, to modify everything.

From that moment Miss Cotton's trouble began, and it became a torment
that mounted and gave her no peace till she imparted it. She said to
herself that she should suffer to the utmost in this matter, and if she
spoke to any one, it must not be to same one who had agreed with her
about Alice, but to some hard, skeptical nature, some one who would look
at it from a totally different point of view, and would punish her for
her error, if she had committed an error, in supporting and consoling
Alice. All the time she was thinking of Mrs. Brinkley; Mrs. Brinkley
had come into her mind at once; but it was only after repeated struggles
that she could get the strength to go to her.

Mrs. Brinkley, sacredly pledged to secrecy, listened with a sufficiently
dismaying air to the story which Miss Cotto