hink I'm not old enough--but I am. Oh! you ought to tell me, mother!'

How had she defended herself? staved off the inevitable once again?
All she knew was that Miss Anna had again come to the rescue, had
taken the child away, whispering to her. And since then, in these
last forty-eight hours--oh! Carrie had been good! So quiet, so
useful--unpacking their clothes, helping Miss Anna's maid with the
supper, cooking, dusting, mending, as a Canadian girl knows how--only
stopping sometimes to look round her, with that clouded, wondering
look, as though the past invaded her.

Oh! she was a darling! John would see that--whatever he might feel
towards her mother. 'I stole her--but I've brought her back. I may be
a bad wife--but there's Carrie! I've not neglected her--I've done the
best by her.'

It was in incoherent, unspoken words like this that Phoebe was for
ever pleading with her husband, even now.

Presently, in her walk about the room, she came to stand before the
mantelpiece, where a photograph had been propped up against the
wall by Carrie--of a white walled farm, with its out-buildings and
orchards--and, gleaming beneath it, the wide waters of Lake Ontario.
Phoebe shuddered at the sight of it. Twelve years of her life had been
wasted there.

Carrie, indeed, took a very different view.

Restlessly the mother left her room and wandered into Carrie's. It was
already--by half-past nine--spotlessly clean and neat; and Eliza, the
girl from Hawkshead, had not been allowed to touch it. On the bed lay
a fresh 'waist,' which Carrie had just made for herself, and on the
dressing-table stood another photograph--not a place this time, but a
person--a very evident and very good-looking young man!

Phoebe stood looking at it forlornly. Carrie's young romance--and her
own spoilt life--these two images held her. Carrie would go back, in
time, across the sea--would marry, would forget her mother.

'And I'm not old, neither--I'm not old.'

Trembling she left the room. The door of Miss Anna's was open. Phoebe
stood on the threshold, looking in. It had been her room and John's in
the old days. Their very furniture was still there--as in the parlour,
too. For John had sold it all to their landlord, when he wound up
affairs. Miss Anna knew even what he had got for it--poor John!

She dared not go in. She stood leaning against the door-post, looking
from outside, like one in exile, at the low-raftered room, with its
oak press, and