beautiful, well-dressed, queen-like woman whom she had parted with when
a mere girl, and had never seen since her marriage. "Rings on your
fingers, and a gold chain round your neck, and everything you can wish
for. Oh, Betsy, I made your fortune, and you never take a thought for
me. I might be dead and buried, and you'd never care a straw. I have
had a hard life, a very hard life--tossed about from place to place,
and often in want of many things that at my time of life I need to
get--and you in such luxury. My pretty girl, my beautiful daughter!"

Whatever might have been the resemblance between mother and daughter,
there were but slight traces of it now. Mrs. Peck might have been
beautiful at sixteen, but her life had not been so conservative of her
charms as Mrs. Phillips's was; besides, Mrs. Phillips resembled her
father much more than her mother, and he had been of a much more
lymphatic temperament, and was at the same time a remarkably handsome
man. Mrs. Peck was not yet sixty, but she looked old for her years, and
more like the grandmother than the mother of Mrs. Phillips, whose easy
circumstances, indulgent husband, and indolent, self-regarding life,
with no emotion and little excitement, had kept her face free from a
single line of care or anxiety. Her mother's face was ploughed up with
innumerable lines, and her features seemed to work with every varying
passion, while her expression was hungry, eager, and wolf-like, without
showing anything more intellectual than cunning, even in its calmest
moments.

"Oh!" said Mrs. Phillips, "if Stanley was to find you here, he would
never forgive me."

"Is it your fault that I could not rest till I saw you again? I never
thought he'd be so cruel and unreasonable as to blame you for what I'd
do."

"But I heard you was in Adelaide, and Mr. Phillips says that, as long
as you stay in Adelaide, he will see that you know no want. Oh, mother,
you had better go back to Adelaide!" said Mrs. Phillips.

"Is that my girl as is talking?" said Mrs. Peck, disdainfully,--"my
girl as I loved so dear, and was so proud of--that now, when I've come
all the way from Adelaide, and risked all I've got to depend upon, just
to please my old eyes with the sight of her handsome face, and my poor
old ears with the sound of her voice, would banish me the minute I
come! That's a pretty husband you've got--that you're so afeard of him.
You deserve that your children should turn against you when t