could wish. 'J'y suis, j'y reste,' ought to be,
though it is not, my family motto. And so you missed your train. Very
trying to miss trains, is it not? And you must be tired, my dear. I hope
Maud saw that you had enough to eat, and that you like your room."

"Miss Carson has only this minute arrived, Madam," interposed Martin from
the door. "And Miss Maud directed me to take her straight to you."

"And you have had nothing to eat since you arrived!" Mrs. Danvers
exclaimed in a horrified tone. "Why, my dear, you must be starving! Come
with me to the dining-room at once."

She got slowly up out of her capacious chair as she spoke, and as she did
so a piece of knitting slid from her lap to the floor, while a big ball
of worsted rolled away under the nearest sofa. Margaret first picked up
the knitting and then pursued the ball and restored both to their owner,
an action which, although she did not know it at the time, she was
destined to perform very often for Mrs. Danvers, for that lady was very
rarely unaccompanied by a piece of knitting, which she invariably dropped
when she rose; to knit, she said, soothed the nerves, and gave an added
pleasure to conversation. Reading she was not fond of, and scarcely ever
opened a book or a newspaper, but she would knit and talk, chiefly about
her children, for hours at a stretch. When her knitting had been restored
to her now, and half a row of stitches dropped in the fall picked up, she
led the way into the dining-room. She was kindness and hospitality
itself, but though her incessant flow of talk obviated all necessity
for Margaret to contribute more than the merest monosyllables, the strain
of listening and being ready to say Yes or No in the right places
fatigued Margaret so greatly that by the end of the meal her brain was in
a whirl, and if Mrs. Danvers had put to her one-tenth of the questions to
which Eleanor had supplied ready-made answers, her replies would have
been so extraordinarily muddled up that the deception the two girls were
practising would have been found out at once.

But Mrs. Danvers, like her daughter Maud, was far more interested in her
own concerns than in those of any one with whom she might come in
contact.

But her conversation did differ from Maud's in that it was not of herself
she mainly spoke. It was evident, even to Margaret's tired brain, that
Mrs. Danver's whole being was wrapped up in her children. She would talk
about them and praise them li