he night had closed down thick and
damp, was just a little disposed to low spirits. She had not been out,
and nobody had come to see her. She felt the weariness that follows for
certain sociable natures upon a long stretch of hours without renewal
from outside.

She sensibly reacted against it by making the sitting-room as cozy as
she could, drawing close the crushed-strawberry curtains, piling wood on
the fire, placing a screen so that it shielded her chair and table from
the draft; and, seated in her chimney-corner, took up a piece of
knitting.

She was not very fond of reading, and she was fond of knitting large
soft woolly afghans, of which she made presents to her friends. Reading
seemed to her, anyhow, a rather idle thing to be doing. Knitting came
under the head of work. How often had her story-paper been snatched from
her when she was a girl, and a sock to knit thrust in her hand, with the
bidding to be about something useful. How she had hated it. But now that
she was free she still had a better conscience when she knit.

To the click of her long wooden needles she thought, with more pleasure
than was afforded by any other vision at the moment, of a hot water
bottle gently warming the bed into which she meant to creep at exactly
nine o'clock. This hour she had set when at eight already the temptation
to go to bed and forget the unsatisfactory day in sound warm slumbers
had been so strong as to make yielding to it appear wrong.

These vestiges of Puritanism Aurora did not recognize as such, but yet
her mind as she was practicing self-discipline turned, without seeking
for the reason, toward the person who had done most to inculcate in her
the doctrine that if you like to do a thing that itself is almost surely
a sign of the thing being wicked, and that if you dislike it it is very
probably your duty.

While she continued to appear the signora to whom the servants' eyes
were accustomed, albeit a trifle more absent and unsmiling, she was to
herself a young girl in a far country, living and moving in scenes of
difficulty and misunderstanding with a sharp-chinned, narrow-chested,
timidly-beloved just woman--her mother, long since laid to rest....

There was nothing from outside to dispel the faint heartache
accompanying this retrospection; wind and rain against the windows were
more proper to increase the melancholy, and Aurora, suddenly sick of
staying up to be blue, wound her yarn to start for bed. But first