cup of tea!"

Mrs. Milroy seized her hand and stopped her. Trifling as it was,
Neelie's reference to the relations between the major and Miss Gwilt had
roused her mother's ready jealousy. The restraints which Mrs. Milroy
had laid on herself thus far vanished in a moment--vanished even in the
presence of a girl of sixteen, and that girl her own child!

"Wait here!" she said, eagerly. "You have come to the right place and
the right person. Go on abusing Miss Gwilt. I like to hear you--I hate
her, too!"

"You, mamma!" exclaimed Neelie, looking at her mother in astonishment.

For a moment Mrs. Milroy hesitated before she said more. Some last-left
instinct of her married life in its earlier and happier time pleaded
hard with her to respect the youth and the sex of her child. But
jealousy respects nothing; in the heaven above and on the earth beneath,
nothing but itself. The slow fire of self-torment, burning night and day
in the miserable woman's breast, flashed its deadly light into her eyes,
as the next words dropped slowly and venomously from her lips.

"If you had had eyes in your head, you would never have gone to your
father," she said. "Your father has reasons of his own for hearing
nothing that you can say, or that anybody can say, against Miss Gwilt."

Many girls at Neelie's age would have failed to see the meaning hidden
under those words. It was the daughter's misfortune, in this instance,
to have had experience enough of the mother to understand her. Neelie
started back from the bedside, with her face in a glow. "Mamma!" she
said, "you are talking horribly! Papa is the best, and dearest, and
kindest--oh, I won't hear it! I won't hear it!"

Mrs. Milroy's fierce temper broke out in an instant--broke out all the
more violently from her feeling herself, in spite of herself, to have
been in the wrong.

"You impudent little fool!" she retorted, furiously. "Do you think I
want _you_ to remind me of what I owe to your father? Am I to learn how
to speak of your father, and how to think of your father, and how to
love and honor your father, from a forward little minx like you! I was
finely disappointed, I can tell you, when you were born--I wished for
a boy, you impudent hussy! If you ever find a man who is fool enough to
marry you, he will be a lucky man if you only love him half as well,
a quarter as well, a hundred-thousandth part as well, as I loved your
father. Ah, you can cry when it's too late; you can come