s.
Finn's care.

Very quickly there came to be close intimacy between Mrs. Finn
and Lady Mary. For a day or two the elder woman, though the place
she filled was one of absolute confidence, rather resisted than
encouraged the intimacy. She always remembered that the girl was the
daughter of a great duke, and that her position in the house had
sprung from circumstances which would not, perhaps, in the eyes of
the world at large, have recommended her for such friendship. She
knew--the reader may possibly know--that nothing had ever been
purer, nothing more disinterested than her friendship. But she knew
also,--no one knew better,--that the judgment of men and women
does not always run parallel with facts. She entertained, too, a
conviction in regard to herself, that hard words and hard judgments
were to be expected from the world,--were to be accepted by her
without any strong feeling of injustice,--because she had been
elevated by chance to the possession of more good things than she
had merited. She weighed all this with a very fine balance, and even
after the encouragement she had received from the Duke, was intent on
confining herself to some position about the girl inferior to that
which such a friend as Lady Cantrip might have occupied. But the
girl's manner, and the girl's speech about her own mother, overcame
her. It was the unintentional revelation of the Duchess's constant
reference to her,--the way in which Lady Mary would assert that
"Mamma used always to say this of you; mamma always knew that you
would think so and so; mamma used to say that you had told her." It
was the feeling thus conveyed, that the mother who was now dead had
in her daily dealings with her own child spoken of her as her nearest
friend, which mainly served to conquer the deference of manner which
she had assumed.

Then gradually there came confidences,--and at last absolute
confidence. The whole story about Mr. Tregear was told. Yes; she
loved Mr. Tregear. She had given him her heart, and had told him so.

"Then, my dear, your father ought to know it," said Mrs. Finn.

"No; not yet. Mamma knew it."

"Did she know all that you have told me?"

"Yes; all. And Mr. Tregear spoke to her, and she said that papa ought
not to be told quite yet."

Mrs. Finn could not but remember that the friend she had lost was
not, among women, the one best able to give a girl good counsel in
such a crisis.

"Why not yet, dear?"

"Well, because--. It