der then usual as she sat alone in the sunshine
of a lovely autumn morning and was driven between the beautiful
English hedgerows and through the fertile fields which she had
learned to love. How soon would all be changed for her! And changed
to what? The isolated exile of a place filled with the haunting
memories of the past--her mother, whom she had lost forever, and her
young lover, who was as absolutely lost to her.

Strangely to herself, it was the latter that she felt to be the
keener pain. To the former she was reconciled; as we do, sooner or
later, reconcile ourselves to the inevitable; but the supreme sting
of this other grief was that she felt it need not have been. Sitting
there in her carriage, the object of much eager attention, she felt
so desolate and wretched that it was with difficulty that she kept
back her tears.

She dreaded the ordeal before her. She felt that she must take leave
of these people and say a word of kindness to them, since she was so
miserably unable to do more; but these visits were always depressing.
Since the tenants had discovered that they had a sympathetic listener
in her, they had luxuriated in the pouring out of their sorrows. Of
course they had not ventured to accuse her husband of being connected
with them, but the lesson was one that he who ran might read.

So, when the carriage stopped at the door of the first cottage, she
had made up her mind that she could not stand much in the way of
these miserable confidences to-day, and would make her visits short.

But when she entered the house she was conscious of a total change of
atmosphere. Every creature in the room gave proof of this, according
to his or her kind. The old woman who sat knitting by the hearth
looked up at her with a dim twinkle in the eyes that had heretofore
expressed nothing but a consciousness that things were bad and
getting worse; and the children, who, indeed, had taken little count
of the depression of their elders, now manifestly shared their relief
from it. It was their mother who, with a strange smile of hope on her
careworn face and a fervent clasping together of her work-worn hands,
made the explanation to the visitor.

But this explanation, when it had been heard, was almost more of an
ordeal to Bettina than the one which she had feared. Certainly it
made a stronger demand upon her power of self-control. For the
key-note of it all was Horace. He had been here before her, and had
done, or prom