umination, for it showed her a silver thread of
hair near enough to the nostril to be stirred to and fro by the breath
that went and came. And by its light the delicate transparency of the
wrist showed the regular pulsation of the heart. All was well.

She had plenty to occupy her thoughts. She could sit and think of the
strangeness of her own life, and its extraordinary inequalities. What
could clash more discordantly than this moment and a memory of a month
ago that rushed into her mind for no apparent reason but to make a
parade of its own incongruity. Do you remember that brilliant dress of
Madame Pontet that she tried on at Park Lane, with "the usual tight
armhole"? That dress had figured as a notable achievement of the
_modiste's_ art, worthy of its wearer's surpassing beauty, in a dazzling
crowd of Stars and Garters and flashing diamonds, and loveliness that
was old enough for Society, and valour that was too old for the field of
battle; and much of the wit of the time and a little of the learning,
trappings of well-mounted _dramatis personae_ on the World's stage. That
dress and its contents had made many a woman jealous, and been tenacious
of many a man's memory, young and old, for weeks after. Here was the
wearer, watching in the night beside a convict's relict, a worse
convict's mother, a waif and stray picked up in a London Court off
Tottenham Court Road! And the heart of the watcher was praying for only
one little act of grace in Destiny, to grant a short span yet of life,
were it no more than a year, to this frail survivor of a long and cruel
separation from one whose youth had been another self to her own.

And as for that other affair, what _did_ she really recollect of it?
Well--she could remember that tight armhole, certainly, and was far from
sure she should ever forget it.

The chance that had brought the sisters back to each other was so
strange that the story of their deception and the loss of every clue to
its remedy seemed credible by comparison--a negligible improbability.
Would they necessarily have recognised one another at all if that letter
had not come into the hands of her father? She herself would never have
dared to open it; or, if she had, would she have understood its
contents? Without that letter, what would the course of events have
been? Go back and think of it! Imagine old Mrs. Picture in charge of
Widow Thrale, groundedly suspected of lunacy, miserable under the fear
that the su