ove
my husband and settle down to a life of quiet domestic bliss. Oh, it's
easy enough to intend!"

The girl's face wrinkled with a laugh that aged her. In that moment it
was a hard, evil face, and with a pang the elder woman thought of that
other face, so like, yet so unlike--the sweet pure face of a girl that
had given to a sordid home its one touch of nobility. As under the
lightning's flash we see the whole arc of the horizon, so Mrs. Eppington
looked and saw her child's life. The gilded, over-furnished room
vanished. She and a big-eyed, fair-haired child, the only one of her
children she had ever understood, were playing wonderful games in the
twilight among the shadows of a tiny attic. Now she was the wolf,
devouring Edith, who was Red Riding Hood, with kisses. Now Cinderella's
prince, now both her wicked sisters. But in the favourite game of all,
Mrs. Eppington was a beautiful princess, bewitched by a wicked dragon, so
that she seemed to be an old, worn woman. But curly-headed Edith fought
the dragon, represented by the three-legged rocking-horse, and slew him
with much shouting and the toasting-fork. Then Mrs. Eppington became
again a beautiful princess, and went away with Edith back to her own
people.

In this twilight hour the misbehaviour of the "General," the importunity
of the family butcher, and the airs assumed by cousin Jane, who kept two
servants, were forgotten.

The games ended. The little curly head would be laid against her breast
"for five minutes' love," while the restless little brain framed the
endless question that children are for ever asking in all its thousand
forms, "What is life, mother? I am very little, and I think, and think,
until I grow frightened. Oh, mother, tell me, what is life?"

Had she dealt with these questions wisely? Might it not have been better
to have treated them more seriously? Could life after all be ruled by
maxims learned from copy-books? She had answered as she had been
answered in her own far-back days of questioning. Might it not have been
better had she thought for herself?

Suddenly Edith was kneeling on the floor beside her.

"I will try to be good, mother."

It was the old baby cry, the cry of us all, children that we are, till
mother Nature kisses us and bids us go to sleep.

Their arms were round each other now, and so they sat, mother and child
once more. And the twilight of the old attic, creeping westward from the
east, found t