ens's eyesight if she had not
had such an obstinate husband. Stephen was a connection of the departed
saddler, the speaker's husband.

Said Sister Nora as they rose to rejoin the carriage:--"Now
remember!--you're not to fuss over Dave, Mrs. Thrale. _We'll_ see that
he comes to no harm." The ogress did not seem so uneasy about the child,
saying:--"It's the picture of the man running from the Police Granny
goes by, and 'tis no more than any boy might draw." Whereat Sister Nora
said, laughing: "You needn't get scared about Mickey, if that's it. He's
just a young monkey." But the old woman seemed still to be concealing
disquiet, saying only:--"I had no thought of the boy." She had formed
some misapprehension of Dave's surrounding influences, which seemed hard
to clear up.

Riding home Gwen turned suddenly to her cousin, after reflective
silence, saying:--"What makes the old Goody so ferocious against the
little boy's Mrs. Picture?" To which the reply was:--"Jealousy, I
suppose. What a beautiful sunset! That means wind." But Sister Nora was
talking rather at random, and there may have been no jealousy of old
Maisie in the heart of old Phoebe.

Moreover, Gwen's was not an inquiry-question demanding an answer. It was
interrogative chat. She was thinking all the while how amused Adrian
would have been with Dave's letter and the escaped prisoner. Then her
thought was derailed by one of the sudden jerks that crossed the line so
often in these days. Chat with herself must needs turn on the mistakes
she had made in not borrowing that letter to enclose with her next one
to Adrian, for him to ... to _what_? There came the jerk! What could he
see? Indeed, one of the sorest trials of this separation from him was
the way her correspondence--for she had insisted on freedom in this
respect--was handicapped by his inability to read it. How could she
allow all she longed to say to pass under the eyes even of Irene, dear
friend though she had become? She would have given worlds for an
automaton that could read aloud, whose speech would repeat all its eyes
saw, without passing the meaning of it through an impertinent mind.

Sister Nora was quite in her confidence about her love-affair; in fact,
she had seen Adrian for a moment, her arrival at the Towers on her way
from Scotland after her father's death having overlapped his
departure--which had been delayed a few days by pretexts of a shallow
nature--just long enough to admit of the intro