e that all would yet be well. But I had never sounded the full
bitterness of madam's morbid heart, well as I thought I knew it. The
hatred she had felt from the first for her husband's child ripened into
frenzied dislike when she found her a living image of the mother whose
picture she had come across among Frank's personal effects. To win a
tear from those meek eyes instead of a smile to the sensitive lips was
her daily play. She seemed to exult in the joy of impressing upon the
girl by how little she had missed a great fortune, and I have often
thought, much as I tried to keep my mind free from all extravagant and
unnecessary fancies, that half of the money she spent in beautifying
this house and maintaining art industries and even great charitable
institutions was spent with the base purpose of demonstrating to this
child the power of immense wealth, and in what ways she might expect to
see her little brother expend the millions in which she had been denied
all share.

"I was so sure of this that one night while I was winding up the clocks
with which Mrs. Postlethwaite in her fondness for old timepieces has
filled the house, I stopped to look at the little figure toiling so
wearily upstairs, to bed, without a mother's kiss. There was an appeal
in the small wistful face which smote my hard old heart, and possibly a
tear welled up in my own eye when I turned back to my duty."

"Was that why I felt the hand of Providence upon me, when in my
halt before the one clock to which any superstitious interest was
attached--the great one at the foot of the stairs--I saw that it had
stopped and at the one minute of all minutes in our wretched lives: Four
minutes past two? The hour, the minute in which Frank Postlethwaite had
gasped his last under the pressure of his wife's hand! I knew it--the
exact minute I mean--because Providence meant that I should know it.
There had been a clock on the mantelpiece of the hotel room where he and
his brother had died and I had seen her glance steal towards it at the
instant she withdrew her palm from her husband's lips. The stare of
that dial and the position of its hands had lived still in my mind as I
believed it did in hers.

"Four minutes past two! How came our old timepiece here to stop at that
exact moment on a day when Duty was making its last demand upon me to
remember Frank's unhappy child? There was no one to answer; but as I
looked and looked, I felt the impulse of the moment stre