as just eighteen years old when my father married her,
and she was not six-and-twenty when she died.

[I got so far in writing my life, seated at the round, three-legged
pinewood table, with Eleanor scribbling away opposite to me. But I could
get no further just then. I put my hands before my eyes as if to shade
them from the light; but Eleanor is very quick, and she found out that I
was crying. She jumped up and threw herself at my feet.

"Margery, dear Margery! what _is_ the matter?"

I could only sob, "My mother, O my mother!" and add, almost bitterly,
"It is very well for you to write about your childhood, who have had a
mother--and such a mother!--all your life; but for me----"

Eleanor knelt straight up, with her teeth set, and her hands clasped
before her.

"I do think," she said slowly, "that I am, without exception, the most
selfish, inconsiderate, dense, unfeeling brute that ever lived." She
looked so quaintly, vehemently in earnest as she knelt in the firelight,
that I laughed in spite of my tears.

"My dear old thing," I said, "it is I who am selfish, not you. But I am
going on now, and I promise to disturb you no more." And in this I was
resolute, though Eleanor would have burned our papers then and there,
if I had not prevented her.

Indeed she knew as well as I did that it was not merely because I was an
orphan that I wept, as I thought of my early childhood. We could not
speak of it, but she knew enough to guess at what was passing through my
mind. I was only six years old when my mother died, but I can remember
her. I can remember her brief appearances in the room where I played, in
much dirt and contentment, at my Ayah's feet--rustling in silks and
satins, glittering with costly ornaments, beautiful and scented, like a
fairy dream. I would forego all these visions for one--only one--memory
of her praying by my bedside, or teaching me at her knee. But she was so
young, and so pretty! And yet, O Mother, Mother! better than all the
triumphs of your loveliness in its too short prime would it have been to
have left a memory of your beautiful face with some devout or earnest
look upon it--"as it had been the face of an angel"--to your only child.

As I sit thinking thus, I find Eleanor's dark eyes gazing at me from her
place, to which she has gone back; and she says softly, "Margery, dear
Margery, do let us give it up." But I would not give it up now, for
anything whatever.]

The first six years of