he explained
about the change in her life to the Carringfords, to find that they
knew all about her mother; probably her little world, Georgy, Dr.
Ransome, knew it, too, while these years she had comforted herself
with the thought that, at least, it was her secret shame.

Mrs. Carringford put an arm about her and kissed her. There was
approval in the action.

Emily looked at her, then laughed nervously, while a vivid scarlet
rose to the roots of her chestnut hair.

As Alexina passed through the front-room study going home, the old
minister glanced up from his writing and called her name. He pushed
his spectacles back onto his leonine head, looking up as she came
toward him. She was surprised, for he never had seemed conscious even
of her comings and goings.

"There are two ties that are not of our making," he told her; "the
spiritual tie between the Creator and the created, and the material
tie between the parent and the child. They are ties not of duty but of
nature, as indestructible as matter. God go with you."

She felt strange and choked, though she was not sure she knew what he
meant.

A week after she became of age she was dismantling the bay-windowed
room of such things as were hers. Little by little it grew as cold and
cheerless as the one adjoining, now the personality of Aunt Harriet
was gone out of it. What would become of Uncle Austen after both were
gone?

She had tried to force from him some expression of feeling, at first
wistfully, then determinedly. There is a chance, had he responded,
that she would have made other arrangements for her mother. Then she
told herself she did not care and went hotly on with her preparations.

She had taken two bedrooms and a parlour at a hotel, and had written
her mother to go directly there, but the night of her arrival the girl
felt she could not go to meet her. It was too late an hour anyhow, she
would wait until morning, but she shrank so from that first moment she
could not sleep.

She and her uncle met at the breakfast table the next morning. She
made one or two attempts at conversation. "I go to-day, Uncle Austen,"
she said at last, and, leaning forward, pushed a paper across the
table to him. It was the final statement of the household expenditures
under her management.

Her board from her first coming had been paid into the general house
fund, and, accordingly, she had included against herself charge for
these several days in the new month.

Noti