t sure that she did not, when Mr Rubb pressed her hand at parting,
and told her that her great kindness had been of the most material
service to the firm. "He felt it," he said, "if nobody else did."
That also might be a sacrificial duty and therefore gratifying.

The next morning she and Susanna left Gower Street at eight, spent
an interesting period of nearly an hour at the railway station, and
reached Littlebath in safety at one.

CHAPTER IX

Miss Mackenzie's Philosophy

Miss Mackenzie remained quiet in her room for two days after her
return before she went out to see anybody. These last Christmas weeks
had certainly been the most eventful period of her life, and there
was very much of which it was necessary that she should think. She
had, she thought, made up her mind to refuse her cousin's offer; but
the deed was not yet done. She had to think of the mode in which she
must do it; and she could not but remember, also, that she might
still change her mind in that matter if she pleased. The anger
produced in her by Lady Ball's claim, as it were, to her fortune,
had almost evaporated; but the memory of her cousin's story of his
troubles was still fresh. "I have a hard time of it sometimes, I can
tell you." Those words and others of the same kind were the arguments
which had moved her, and made her try to think that she could love
him. Then she remembered his bald head and the weary, careworn look
about his eyes, and his little intermittent talk, addressed chiefly
to his mother, about the money-market,--little speeches made as he
would sit with the newspaper in his hand:

"The Confederate loan isn't so bad, after all. I wish I'd taken a
few."

"You know you'd never have slept if you had," Lady Ball would answer.

All this Miss Mackenzie now turned in her mind, and asked herself
whether she could be happy in hearing such speeches for the remainder
of her life.

"It is not as if you two were young people, and wanted to be billing
and cooing," Lady Ball had said to her the same evening.

Miss Mackenzie, as she thought of this, was not so sure that Lady
Ball was right. Why should she not want billing and cooing as well as
another? It was natural that a woman should want some of it in her
life, and she had had none of it yet. She had had a lover, certainly,
but there had been no billing and cooing with him. Nothing of that
kind had been possible in her brother Walter's house.

And then the question natur