with
any previous inspection.

"We shall be glad to receive a reply at your early convenience, and in
the meantime

"We remain, madam,

"Your most obedient servants,

"Baunton and Lutterworth."

Miss Joliffe read this letter for the hundredth time, and dwelt with
unabated complacency on the "formerly in the possession of the late
Michael Joliffe, Esquire." There was about the phrase something of
ancestral dignity and importance that gratified her, and dulled the
sordid bitterness of her surroundings. "The late Michael Joliffe,
Esquire"--it read like a banker's will; and she was once more Euphemia
Joliffe, a romantic girl sitting in Wydcombe church of a summer Sunday
morning, proud of a new sprigged muslin, and proud of many tablets to
older Joliffes on the walls about her; for yeomen in Southavonshire have
pedigrees as well as Dukes.

At first sight it seemed as if Providence had offered her in this letter
a special solution of her difficulties, but afterwards scruples had
arisen that barred the way of escape. "A large painting of flowers"--
her father had been proud of it--proud of his worthless wife's work; and
when she herself was a little child, had often held her up in his arms
to see the shining table-top and touch the caterpillar. The wound his
wife had given him must still have been raw, for that was only a year
after Sophia had left him and the children; yet he was proud of her
cleverness, and perhaps not without hope of her coming back. And when
he died he left to poor Euphemia, then half-way through the dark gorge
of middle age, an old writing-desk full of little tokens of her mother--
the pair of gloves she wore at her wedding, a flashy brooch, a pair of
flashy earrings, and many other unconsidered trifles that he had
cherished. He left her, too, Sophia's long wood paint-box, with its
little bottles of coloured powders for mixing oil-paints, and this same
"basket of flowers on a mahogany table, with a caterpillar in the
left-hand corner."

There had always been a tradition as to the value of this picture. Her
father had spoken little of his wife to the children, and it was only
piecemeal, as she grew into womanhood, that Miss Euphemia learnt from
hints and half-told truths the story of her mother's shame. But Michael
Joliffe was known to have considered this painting his wife's
masterpiece, and old Mrs Janaway reported that Sophia had told her many
a time it would fetch a hundr