unt of her
arrival at Knapwater to Owen. The dismal and heart-breaking pictures
that Miss Aldclyffe had placed before her the preceding evening, the
later terrors of the night, were now but as shadows of shadows, and she
smiled in derision at her own excitability.

But writing Edward's letter was the great consoler, the effect of each
word upon him being enacted in her own face as she wrote it. She felt
how much she would like to share his trouble--how well she could endure
poverty with him--and wondered what his trouble was. But all would be
explained at last, she knew.

At the appointed time she went to Miss Aldclyffe's room, intending, with
the contradictoriness common in people, to perform with pleasure, as a
work of supererogation, what as a duty was simply intolerable.

Miss Aldclyffe was already out of bed. The bright penetrating light
of morning made a vast difference in the elder lady's behaviour to her
dependent; the day, which had restored Cytherea's judgment, had effected
the same for Miss Aldclyffe. Though practical reasons forbade her
regretting that she had secured such a companionable creature to read,
talk, or play to her whenever her whim required, she was inwardly vexed
at the extent to which she had indulged in the womanly luxury of making
confidences and giving way to emotions. Few would have supposed that the
calm lady sitting aristocratically at the toilet table, seeming scarcely
conscious of Cytherea's presence in the room, even when greeting her,
was the passionate creature who had asked for kisses a few hours before.

It is both painful and satisfactory to think how often these
antitheses are to be observed in the individual most open to our
observation--ourselves. We pass the evening with faces lit up by some
flaring illumination or other: we get up the next morning--the fiery
jets have all gone out, and nothing confronts us but a few crinkled
pipes and sooty wirework, hardly even recalling the outline of the
blazing picture that arrested our eyes before bedtime.

Emotions would be half starved if there were no candle-light. Probably
nine-tenths of the gushing letters of indiscreet confession are written
after nine or ten o'clock in the evening, and sent off before day
returns to leer invidiously upon them. Few that remain open to catch
our glance as we rise in the morning, survive the frigid criticism of
dressing-time.

The subjects uppermost in the minds of the two women who had thus c