eyelids. Thus Sarah departed under the impression
that Miss Jane had grown up into a rather a heartless young lady. But
Fraulein and Jebbie never knew why, from that day onward, the hands, of
which they had so often had cause to complain, were kept scrupulously
clean; and on her birthday night, unashamed in the quiet darkness, the
lonely little child kissed her own hands beneath the bedclothes,
striving thus to reach the tenderness of her dead mother's lips.

And in after years, when she became her own mistress, one of her first
actions was to advertise for Sarah Matthews and engage her as her own
maid, at a salary which enabled the good woman eventually to buy
herself a comfortable annuity.

Jane saw but little of her father, who had found it difficult to
forgive her, firstly, for being a girl when he desired a son; secondly,
being a girl, for having inherited his plainness rather than her
mother's beauty. Parents are apt to see no injustice in the fact that
they are often annoyed with their offspring for possessing attributes,
both of character and appearance, with which they themselves have
endowed them.

The hero of Jane's childhood, the chum of her girlhood and the close
friend of her maturer years, was Deryck Brand, only son of the rector
of the parish, and her senior by nearly ten years. But even in their
friendship, close though it was, she had never felt herself first to
him. As a medical student, at home during vacations, his mother and his
profession took precedence in his mind of the lonely child, whose
devotion pleased him and whose strong character and original mental
development interested him. Later on he married a lovely girl, as
unlike Jane as one woman could possibly be to another; but still their
friendship held and deepened; and now, when he was rapidly advancing to
the very front rank of his profession, her appreciation of his work,
and sympathetic understanding of his aims and efforts, meant more to
him than even the signal mark of royal favour, of which he had lately
been the recipient.

Jane Champion had no close friends amongst the women of her set. Her
lonely girlhood had bred in her an absolute frankness towards herself
and other people which made it difficult for her to understand or
tolerate the little artificialities of society, or the trivial
weaknesses of her own sex. Women to whom she had shown special
kindness--and they were many--maintained an attitude of grateful
admiration in