the story were to be told at all, her thunderbolt directness
would have it all out, down to the ground. Her mother went through the
_pros_ and _cons_ again and again, and always came to the same
conclusion--silence.

But for all that, Rosalind had a background belief that a time would
come when a complete revelation would be possible. Her mind stipulated
for a wider experience for Sally before then. It would be so infinitely
easier to tell her tale to one who had herself arrived at the goal of
motherhood, utterly unlike as (so she took for granted) was to be the
way of her arrival, sunlit and soft to tread, from the black precipice
and thorny wastes that had brought her to her own.

Any possible marriage of Sally's, however, was a vague abstraction of
an indistinct future. Perhaps we should say _had been_, and admit that
since her own marriage Mrs. Fenwick had begun to be more distinctly
aware that her little daughter was now within a negligible period of
the age when her own tree of happiness in life had been so curtly
broken off short, and no new leafage suffered to sprout upon the broken
stem. This identity of age could not but cause comparison of lots.
"Suppose it had been Sally!" was the thought that would sometimes
spring on her mother's mind; and then the girl would wonder what mamma
was thinking of that she should make her arm that was round her tighten
as though she feared to lose her, or bring her an irrelevant,
unanticipated kiss.

This landmark-period bristled with suggested questions of what was to
follow it. Sally would marry--that seemed inevitable; and her mother,
now that she was herself married again, did not shrink from the idea
as she had done, in spite of her protests against her own selfishness.

Miss Sally's attitude toward the tender passion did not at present
give any grounds for supposing that she was secretly its victim, or
ever would be. Intense amusement at the perturbation she occasioned
to sensitive young gentlemen seemed to be the nearest approach to
reciprocating their sentiments that she held out any hopes of. She
admitted as a pure abstraction that it was possible to be in love,
but regarded applicants as obstacles that stood in their own way.

"I'm sure his adoration does him great credit," she said to Laetitia
one day about a new devotee--for there was no lack of them. "But it's
his eyes, and his nose, and his mouth, and his chin, and his ears, and
his hair, and his hands and hi