ovement, and running away from him up the stone
steps of the balcony into the house.

* * * * *

All through the night, both when waking and in dreams, the remembrance
of the slight cast upon her absent mother by Mr. Amherst, and her own
silent acceptance of it, has disturbed the mind of Marcia. "A dancer!"
The word enrages her.

Molly's little passionate movement and outspoken determination to hear
no ill spoken of her dead father showed Marcia even more forcibly her
own cowardice and mean policy of action. And be sure she likes Molly
none the more in that she was the one to show it. Yet Molly cannot
possibly entertain the same affection for a mere memory that she feels
for the mother on whom she has expended all the really pure and true
love of which she is capable.

It is not, therefore, toward her grandfather, whose evil tongue has
ever been his own undoing, she cherishes the greatest bitterness, but
toward herself, together with a certain scorn that, through moneyed
motives, she has tutored herself to sit by and hear the one she loves
lightly mentioned.

Now, looking back upon it, it appears to her grossest treachery to the
mother whose every thought she knows is hers, and who, in her foreign
home, lives waiting, hoping, for the word that shall restore her to her
arms.

A kind of anxiety to communicate with the injured one, and to pour out
on paper the love she bears her, but dares not breathe at Herst, fills
Marcia. So that when the house is silent on this Sunday
afternoon,--when all the others have wandered into the open air,--she
makes her way to the library, and, sitting down, commences one of the
lengthy, secret, forbidden missives that always find their way to
Italy, in spite of prying eyes and all the untold evils that so surely
wait upon discovery.

To any one acquainted with Marcia, her manner of commencing her letter
would be a revelation. To one so cold, so self-contained, the weaker
symptoms of affection are disallowed; yet this is how she begins:

"My own Beloved,--As yet I have no good news to send you, and
little that I can say,--though ever as I write to you my heart is
full. The old man grows daily more wearisome, more detestable, more
inhuman, yet shows no sign of death. He is even, as it seems to me,
stronger and more full of life than when last I wrote to you, now
three weeks ago. At times I feel dispirited, almost despai