ou asked me whether I envied Ayala. What was I to say?
Perhaps I should have said nothing, but the idea of envying Ayala was
painful to me. Of course she--"

"Well?"

"I had better say nothing more, aunt. If I were to pretend to be
cheerful I should be false. It is as yet only a few weeks since papa
died." Then the work went on in silence between them for the next
hour.

And the work went on in solemn silence between them through the
winter. It came to pass that the sole excitement of Lucy's life
came from Ayala's letters,--the sole excitement except a meeting
which took place between the sisters one day. When Lucy was taken to
Kingsbury Crescent Ayala was at once carried down to Glenbogie, and
from thence there came letters twice a week for six weeks. Ayala's
letters, too, were full of sorrow. She, too, had lost her mother,
her father, and her sister. Moreover, in her foolish petulance she
said things of her Aunt Emmeline, and of the girls, and of Sir
Thomas, which ought not to have been written of those who were
kind to her. Her cousin Tom, too, she ridiculed,--Tom Tringle, the
son-and-heir,--saying that he was a lout who endeavoured to make eyes
at her. Oh, how distasteful, how vulgar they were after all that
she had known. Perhaps the eldest girl, Augusta, was the worst. She
did not think that she could put up with the assumed authority of
Augusta. Gertrude was better, but a simpleton. Ayala declared herself
to be sad at heart. But then the sweet scenery of Glenbogie, and the
colour of the moors, and the glorious heights of Ben Alchan, made
some amends. Even in her sorrow she would rave about the beauties of
Glenbogie. Lucy, as she read the letters, told herself that Ayala's
grief was a grief to be borne, a grief almost to be enjoyed. To sit
and be sad with a stream purling by you, how different from the
sadness of that dining-room in the Crescent. To look out upon the
glories of a mountain, while a tear would now and again force itself
into the eye, how much less bitter than the falling of salt drops
over a tattered towel.

Lucy, in her answers, endeavoured to repress the groans of her
spirit. In the first place she did acknowledge that it did not become
her to speak ill of those who were, in truth, her benefactors; and
then she was anxious not to declare to Ayala her feeling of the
injustice by which their two lots had been defined to them. Though
she had failed to control herself once or twice in speaking t