r,
a preoccupied severity of visage, a way of speaking which suggested
difficult tolerance of injury, an ostentation of discomfort in bodily
inactivity--these were but traditions of happier times; to keep her
Sunday thus was to remind herself of days when the outward functions of
respectability did in truth correspond to self-respect; and it is
probable that often enough, poor woman, the bitterness was not only on
her face. As a young girl in her mother's home she had learnt that the
Christian Sabbath was to be distinguished by absence of joy, and as she
sat through these interminable afternoons, on her lap a sour little book
which she did not read, the easy-chair abandoned for one which hurt her
back, the very cat not allowed to enter the room lest it should gambol,
here on the verge of years which touch the head with grey, her life must
have seemed to her a weary pilgrimage to a goal of discontent. How far
away was girlish laughter, how far the blossoming of hope which should
attain no fruitage, and, alas, how far the warm season of the heart, the
woman's heart that loved and trusted, that joyed in a newborn babe, and
thought not of the day when the babe, in growing to womanhood, should
have journeyed such lengths upon a road where the mother might not
follow.

Neither Hood nor his daughter went to church; the former generally spent
the morning in his garret, the latter helped herself against the
depression which the consciousness of the day engendered by playing
music which respect would have compelled her to refrain from had her
mother been present. The music was occasionally heard by an acquaintance
who for some reason happened to be abroad in church time, and Mrs. Hood
was duly informed of the sad things done in her absence, but she had the
good sense to forbid herself interference with Emily's mode of spending
the Sunday. She could not understand it, but her husband's indifference
to religion had taught her to endure, and, in truth, her own zeal, as I
have said, was not of active colour. Discussion on such subjects there
had never been. Her daughter, she had learnt to concede, was strangely
other than herself; Emily was old enough to have regard for her own
hereafter.

Breakfast on Sunday was an hour later than on other days, and was always
a very silent meal. On the day which we have now reached it was perhaps
more silent than usual. Hood had a newspaper before him on the table;
his wife wore the wonted Sabbat