ve and her scorn undiminished.

"She was a little boisterous as a girl, but I never believed any harm of
her," answered Virginia mildly; and then as Miss Priscilla's lunch was
brought in on a tray, she kissed her tenderly, with a curious feeling
that it was for the last time, and went out of the door and down the
gravelled walk into High Street. An exhaustion greater than any she had
ever known oppressed her as she dragged her body, which felt dead,
through the glorious October weather. Once, when she passed Saint James'
Church, she thought wearily, "How sorry mother would be if she knew,"
while an intolerable pain, which seemed her mother's pain as well as her
own, pierced her heart. Then, as she hurried on, with that nervous haste
which she could no longer control, the terrible haunted blocks appeared
to throng with the faded ghosts of her youth. A grey-haired woman
leaning out of the upper window of an old house nodded to her with a
smile, and she found herself thinking, "I rolled hoops with her once in
the street, and now she is watching her grandchild go out in its
carriage." At any other moment she would have bent, enraptured, over the
perambulator, which was being wheeled, by a nurse and a maid, down the
front steps into the street; but to-day the sight of the soft baby
features, lovingly surrounded by lace and blue ribbons, was like the
turn of a knife in her wound. "And yet mother always said that she was
never so happy as she was with my children," she reflected, while her
personal suffering was eased for a minute by the knowledge of what her
return to Dinwiddie had meant to her mother. "If she had died while I
lived away, I could never have got over it--I could never have forgiven
myself," she added, and there was an exquisite relief in turning even
for an instant away from the thought of herself.

When she reached home luncheon was awaiting her; but after sitting down
at the table and unfolding her napkin, a sudden nausea seized her, and
she felt that it was impossible to sit there facing the mahogany
sideboard, with its gleaming rows of silver, and watch the precise,
slow-footed movements of the maid, who served her as she might have
served a wooden image. "I took such trouble to train her, and now it
makes me sick to look at her," she thought, as she pushed back her chair
and fled hastily from the room into Oliver's study across the hall. Here
her work-bag lay on the table, and taking it up, she sat down b