ased on her severity toward herself. As he
had the courage she had lacked, so she meant him to have the chances
she had missed; and every effort she made for him helped to keep her own
hopes alive.

Her interest in Owen led her to think more often of his mother, and
sometimes she would slip away and stand alone before her predecessor's
portrait. Since her arrival at Givre the picture--a "full-length" by a
once fashionable artist--had undergone the successive displacements of
an exiled consort removed farther and farther from the throne; and
Anna could not help noting that these stages coincided with the gradual
decline of the artist's fame. She had a fancy that if his credit had
been in the ascendant the first Mrs. Leath might have continued to
throne over the drawing-room mantel-piece, even to the exclusion of
her successor's effigy. Instead of this, her peregrinations had finally
landed her in the shrouded solitude of the billiard-room, an apartment
which no one ever entered, but where it was understood that "the light
was better," or might have been if the shutters had not been always
closed.

Here the poor lady, elegantly dressed, and seated in the middle of a
large lonely canvas, in the blank contemplation of a gilt console, had
always seemed to Anna to be waiting for visitors who never came.

"Of course they never came, you poor thing! I wonder how long it
took you to find out that they never would?" Anna had more than once
apostrophized her, with a derision addressed rather to herself than to
the dead; but it was only after Effie's birth that it occurred to her to
study more closely the face in the picture, and speculate on the kind of
visitors that Owen's mother might have hoped for.

"She certainly doesn't look as if they would have been the same kind as
mine: but there's no telling, from a portrait that was so obviously done
'to please the family', and that leaves Owen so unaccounted for. Well,
they never came, the visitors; they never came; and she died of it. She
died of it long before they buried her: I'm certain of that. Those are
stone-dead eyes in the picture...The loneliness must have been awful, if
even Owen couldn't keep her from dying of it. And to feel it so she must
have HAD feelings--real live ones, the kind that twitch and tug. And all
she had to look at all her life was a gilt console--yes, that's it, a
gilt console screwed to the wall! That's exactly and absolutely what he
is!"

She did n