with a smile playing round her mouth.
She was contented, more contented than she had been for many years; for
since Ailleen had come to the station to live, there had not been a day
when Willy had been entirely absent from the house, and so long as he
was somewhere near her Mrs. Dickson was contented. The love, the
unreasoning, unrequited love, she lavished on the boy was the one
mainspring of her existence, the one gleam of happiness left to her
since the terrible day when she had chanced upon the wreck of the
stuck-up coach, and had returned to the station with the alarm, only to
fall, when no one was near to help her, and lie with the fierce sunlight
burning her eyes into blindness, and the weight of a knowledge upon her
mind which would have killed her had not the needs of another life,
dependent upon hers, maintained her.

There was a grim story behind it all--a grim story such as hovers over
the life of a woman who plays with Fate, and is overtaken in the game.
Vanity; love of admiration; thirst for notoriety; the love of men,
easily won and lightly held, till the fascination of one came after
gratified ambition had raised a barrier to its acceptance; the recoil of
jealousy until the barrier was swept away; flight with the one whose
influence had changed the current of life; discovery, and then
disaster--it was a whirl of emotion, a flood of passion, an unkempt
stream of mischief, till the compensating balance swung, and through the
long, black years of blindness the chief character in the drama marked
time while the outlying skeins of the tangle were unravelled, and Fate
resumed control.

In the long, dark, lonely years it grew upon her how terrible a thing it
would be if the one link which connected the happiness of the past with
the present should snap; if the boy, who was the one gleam of light
shining through the gloom of her life, should fail her. As the years
rolled on, and the boy--always a boy to her--had passed from childhood
into youth, his bearing towards her had been constantly in keeping with
the opinion he usually expressed to any of his companions about her:
"She's dotty half the time, and when she ain't, she's scotty." She was
"dotty" when she tried to induce him to talk to her and tell her all he
was doing out in the world of sunlight and sight, the world she could no
longer know; she was "scotty" when she upbraided him, gently and
lovingly, for needing so much questioning and inducing to talk.