hough, unlike Mrs. Carteret, her poorer neighbours had a
great idea of Molly's cleverness. Needless to say that when, after some
unmeasured effort at relieving suffering, Molly would come home with a
sense of joy she rarely knew after any other act, it hurt her to the
quick and roused her deepest anger to find herself treated like a
naughty, inconsiderate child. The storms between Mrs. Carteret and
Molly were increasing in number and intensity, with outspoken wrath on
one side, and a white heat of dumb, indignant resistance on the other.
Then, happily, there came a change. Molly's education had been of the
very slightest until she was nearly sixteen, when Mrs. Carteret told her
to expect the arrival of a finishing governess. She also announced that
a music master from the cathedral town would, in future, come over twice
a week to give her lessons.

"It's not my doing," said Mrs. Carteret,--and meaning only to be candid
she sounded very ungracious; and although she did not pay for these
things, it was due to her urgent representations of their need that they
had been provided. Molly supposed that all such financial arrangements
were made for her by her father's lawyer, of whom she had heard Mrs.
Carteret speak.

Throughout these years it had never occurred to Mrs. Carteret to doubt
that Molly believed her mother to be dead, and she never for a moment
supposed the child's silence on the subject to be ominous. Such silence
did not show any special power of reserve; many children brought up like
Molly will carefully conceal knowledge which they believe that those in
authority over them suppose them not to possess. Perhaps in Molly's case
there was an instinctive shrinking from exposing an ideal to scorn.
Perhaps there was a wholly unconscious want of faith in the ideal
itself, an ideal which had been built up upon one phrase. Yet the notion
of the beautiful, exiled mother, so cruelly concealed from her child,
was very precious, however insecurely founded. It must be concealed from
other eyes by mists of incense, and honoured in the silence of the
sanctuary.

The new governess, Miss Carew, was a very fair teacher, and she soon
recognised the quality of her pupil's mind. Mrs. Carteret was possibly a
little disappointed on finding that Miss Carew considered Molly to be
very clever, as well as very ignorant. The widow was herself accustomed
to feel superior to her own circle in literary attainments,--a sensation
which she ju