the wall?"

"I have been missing Wistaria Terrace," Mary said. "You don't know how
lonesome it feels for the children. I wonder how Mamie is getting on
without me. I want to go home. Indeed, I feel quite able to. I don't
know how I shall do without going home."

"If you went home," said Walter Gray, unexpectedly practical, "your arm
would never set, Mary. You'd be forgetting and doing all manner of
things you oughtn't to do. If Lady Anne is kind enough to ask you to
visit her, stay a while and rest, dear. Indeed, you do too much for your
size."

"You will all miss me so dreadfully."

"Indeed, I don't think we shall miss you--in that way. Oddly enough--I
suppose Matilda was on her mettle--the house seemed quieter when I came
home. The children were in bed. I smelt something good from the kitchen.
Don't imagine that we shall not be able to do without you, child."

Mary, who knew no more of the capable charwoman than Walter Gray did,
looked on this speech of her father's as a mere string of tender
subterfuges. She said nothing, but her eyes rested on her grey woollen
skirt, faded by wear and the weather, and she had an unchildish sense of
the incongruity of her presence as a visitor in Lady Anne's house.
Walter Gray's glance roamed over his young daughter. He saw nothing of
her dreary attire. He saw only the spiritual face, over-pale, the
slender, young, unformed body, graceful as a half-opened flower in its
ill-fitting covering, the slender feet that had a suggestion of race,
the toil-worn hands the fingers of which tapered to fine points.

"You have always done too much, child," he said, with sudden, tender
compunction.

When he rose to go Mary clung to him as though their parting was to be
for years.

"I will come in again to-morrow," he said. "I shall sleep better
to-night for thinking of you in this quiet, restful place. Get some
roses in your cheeks, little girl, before you come back to us."

"I wish I were going back now," said Mary piteously. She looked round
the old walls with their climbing fruit trees as though they were the
walls of a prison. "It is awful not to be able to come and go. And Mamie
will never be able to do without me. The children will be ill----"

He left her in tears. As he re-entered the house by its iron steps up to
a glass door Lady Anne came out from her morning-room and called him
within. He looked about him at the room, walled in with books, with
yellowed marble busts of great