ng her with entire respect--nay, would gladly have
made her altogether one of the family, had she not been so very
reserved.

Miss Silver came forward with the daily nosegay which Mrs. Halifax had
confided to her superintendence.

"They are the best I can find, madam--I believe Watkins keeps all his
greenhouse flowers for to-night."

"Thank you, my dear. These will do very well.--Yes, Guy, persuade Miss
Silver to take your place by the fire. She looks so cold."

But Miss Silver, declining the kindness, passed on to her own seat
opposite.

Ursula busied herself over the breakfast equipage rather nervously.
Though an admirable person, Miss Silver in her extreme and all but
repellant quietness was one whom the mother found it difficult to get
on with. She was scrupulously kind to her; and the governess was as
scrupulously exact in all courtesy and attention; still that
impassible, self-contained demeanour, that great reticence--it might be
shyness, it might be pride--sometimes, Ursula privately admitted,
"fidgeted" her.

To-day was to be a general holiday for both masters and servants; a
dinner at the mills; and in the evening something which, though we call
it a tea-drinking, began to look, I was amused to see, exceedingly like
"a ball." But on this occasion both parents had yielded to their young
people's wishes, and half the neighbourhood had been invited, by the
universally-popular Mr. Guy Halifax to celebrate his coming of age.

"Only once in a way," said the mother, half ashamed of herself for thus
indulging the boy--as, giving his shoulder a fond shake, she called him
"a foolish fellow."

Then we all dispersed; Guy and Walter to ride to the manor-house, Edwin
vanishing with his sister, to whom he was giving daily Latin lessons in
the school-room.

John asked me to take a walk on the hill with him.

"Go, Phineas," whispered his wife--"it will do him good. And don't let
him talk too much of old times. This is a hard week for him."

The mother's eyes were mournful, for Guy and "the child" had been born
within a year and three days of each other; but she never hinted--it
never would have struck her to hint--"this is a hard week for ME."

That grief--the one great grief of their life, had come to her more
wholesomely than to her husband: either because men, the very best of
men, can only suffer, while women can endure; or because in the
mysterious ordinance of nature Maud's baby lips had sucked away