in
demonstrative fashion, flinging their small arms round her neck when she
stoops to kiss them.

Yet Mrs. Roche finds that their mouths are sticky, and the little hands
she clasps in hers hot and unpleasant to the touch.

She rises early, and on churning morning helps her mother even more
industriously than in past days, yet her heart is heavy, and the old
songs never pass her lips without a stifled sob. She tries to hum the
"Miller of Dee," as for the sake of happy recollections she polishes
afresh the pewter service on the parlour table, yet all the while her
eyes are scrutinising the inartistic arrangement of the room. Why should
the horsehair sofa be placed straight against the wall, and those ghastly
wax flowers under glass covers adorn the stiff chimneypiece, which might
be made so pretty? The memorial cards, that are framed and hung on the
wall--how gruesome they appear in the spring sunshine! She longs to pull
them down, and burn them, but to do so would be to violate poor Mrs.
Grebby's most sacred feelings.

She looks in the old family Bible, standing in its accustomed place on a
table by the window. There are the births, deaths, and marriages of the
Grebby family for generations. Oh, if her marriage could be blotted out,
and a date of death mark her name. She envies the twins that died in
their infancy, when she--Eleanor--was only two years old.

The pewter pots tire her arm, unaccustomed, now to rubbing anything but
diamond trinkets. The service she so admired once does not attract her
now. She puts it away half clean, and longs for a novel.

Vegetating was not very soothing after all. The poisoned arrows had
followed her even to Copthorne, and their wounds could not heal. The
thoughts she struggled to suppress, here in the dead calm, proclaimed
themselves more loudly, worked fiercer havoc. She longs, pines, sickens
for a sight of one she must never see, for a voice it would be death to
hear, the touch of a hand it were sin to clasp.

So she wanders about in her strange state of depression, pretending to
enjoy the glorious green of the spring, and seeing only light and
darkness, cold and desolation, in primrose banks and rippling streams.

Mr. Grebby is too preoccupied with his cattle and his land to notice the
change in Eleanor, while Mrs. Grebby takes infinite pains to give her
married daughter the best their house affords, and only remarks on her
lack of appetite, at which she loudly l