nother golden throne, and shared
the good things, and wore minever dresses and velvet robes which trailed
all across the room. Perhaps the houses were not all built of gold;
some of them might be silver; but at any rate the streets were paved
with one or other of the precious metals. And of course, nobody in
London was at all poor, and everybody had as much as he could possibly
eat, and was quite warm and comfortable, and life was all music, and
flowers, and sunshine. Poor little Maude! was her illusion much more
extravagant than some of ours?

But, as we have seen, the hapless travellers never reached their bourne.
And now even Mother was gone, and Maude was left alone in all the
world. The nuns had not been particularly unkind to her; they had
taught her many things, though they had not made her work beyond her
strength; yet not one of them had given her what she missed most--
sympathy. The result was that the child had been unhappy in the
convent, and yet she could not have said why, had she been asked. But
nobody ever asked that of little Maude. She was alone in all the
world--the great, bare, hard, practical world.

For this was the side of the world presented to Maude.

The world is many-sided, and it presents various sides and corners to
various people. The side which Maude saw was hard and bare. Hard bed,
hard fare, hard work, hard words sometimes. Had she any opportunity of
thinking the world a soft, comfortable, cushioned place, as some of her
sisters find it?

This had been the child's life up to the moment when Ursula Drew made
her appearance on the scene. But now a new element was introduced; for
Maude's third home was a stately palace, filled with beautiful carvings,
and delicate tracery, and exquisite colours, all which, lowest of the
low as she was, she enjoyed with an intensity till then unknown to
herself, and certainly not shared by any other in her sphere. That
sense of the beautiful, which, trained in different directions, makes
men poets, painters, and architects, was very strong in little Maude.
She could not have explained in the least _how_ it was that the curves
in the stonework, or the rich colours in the windows of the great hall,
gave her a mysterious sensation of pleasure, which she could not avoid
detecting that they never gave to any of her kitchen associates; and she
obtained many a scolding for her habit of what my Lady the Prioress had
called "idle dreaming," and Mistre