and spare, with sharp
pinched features, and thin pitiless lips, from which very few kindly
words had ever fallen, and where a smile was almost unknown--she was an
almost friendless woman. She who had never rendered a neighbour a
kindly service neither expected nor received any from others. She had
the reputation of being a cross-grained old woman, who had driven her
only daughter away by her unkindness, and had spent what love she had
upon her two sons, who suited her in many ways far better than her
daughter. The youngest of these--Bertha's father--had married a woman
much older than himself, and Bertha was his orphan child, her mother
having died at her birth. She had been taken to live with her
grandmother, at the dying wish of her father: what maternal affection
she possessed responded to this last request of her youngest son, and
Bertha had known no other home.

It was a home, as far as the shelter of a roof and food and clothing
went; and the education of Miss Bayliff's school, given somewhat
grudgingly, was to be granted till Bertha was fifteen.

"_Then_ she must work for her living," Mrs. Skinner had said; "and,"
she added, "few people would have done what _I_ have done."

"A great deal too much!" Joe would say when his mother indulged in this
self-congratulation--"a great deal too much; and I, for one, don't
approve of this girl being nursed in idleness; it was the ruin of
Maggie."

Mrs. Skinner winced a little at the name; for Maggie had disappeared,
and no trace could be found of her.

She had been, so those who remembered her said, of a very different
type to her family, as if she had dropped down from the clouds into it.

That was long ago now, but the people who could look back some years in
the neighbourhood where Mrs. Skinner lived could remember this bright,
gay girl disappearing, and the mother's reply to any inquiry--

"I know nothing about her, nor do I wish to know. She has been and
made her bed, and she must lie on it."

Report said that Maggie had married against her mother's wish, and that
she had literally turned her out of her house. This was about all that
was ever heard, and nothing was really known. Any attempt to question
Mrs. Skinner was met by a sharp rebuff, and very few people, even the
boldest, dare approach her even with an attempt to find out what she
chose to keep secret.

Mrs. Skinner and her son Joe lived in a detached red brick house, built
long before villas wi