ed, "that she really thought she was an
orphan?"

"It's dreadful to think of a very lonely child," he said.

"But some people have to be lonely all their lives," said Molly.

Sir Edmund was touched. She had raised her head and looked at him with a
pleading confidence. Then, with one swift movement, she was suddenly
kneeling and tearing to pieces two or three primroses in succession.

"Some people have to say things that can never be really said, or else
keep everything shut up."

"Don't you think they may make a mistake, and that the things can be
said--" He hesitated; he did not want to press her unfairly into
confidence; "to the right person?" he concluded rather lamely.

"Who is to find the right person?" said Molly bitterly; "the right
person is easy to find for people who have just ordinary cares and
difficulties, but the people who are in real difficulties don't easily
find the right person. I doubt if he or she exists myself!"

She turned to find Edmund Grosse looking at her with far too much
meaning in his face; there was a degree and intensity of interest in his
look that might be read in more than one way.

Molly blushed with the simplicity suited to seventeen rather than to
twenty-one. She was very near to the first outpouring in her life, the
torrent of her pent-up thoughts and feelings was pressing against the
flood-gates. It seemed to her that she had never known true and real
sympathy before she felt that look. She held out her hands towards him
with a little unconscious gesture of appeal.

"I have had a strange life," she said; "I am in very strange
circumstances now."

But Edmund suddenly got up, and before she could speak again a slight
sound on the path showed her that some one was coming.

Rose, finding every one dispersed, had taken a walk by herself in the
wood. She was glad to be alone; she felt the presence of God in the
woods as very near and intimate. Her mind had one of those moments of
complete rest and feeding on beautiful things which come to those who
have known great mental suffering in their lives, and to whom the world
is not giving its gaudy preoccupations. So, walking amidst the glory of
spring lit by a spiritual sunshine, Rose came round a little stunted
yew-tree to find Molly kneeling on the ground ivy, and Edmund standing
by her. Molly rose in one movement to her full height, as if her legs
possessed no jointed impediments, and a fiercely negative expression
filled the