of her mother, last, but by no means
least, a small black lacquer musical-box that played two tunes, "Weel
may the Keel row" and "John Peel,"--these were her worldly possessions.

She sat there; as the day closed down, the trees were swept into the
night, the wind rose in the dark wood, the winter's moon crept pale and
cold into the sky, snow began to fall, at first thinly, then in a
storm, hiding the moon, flinging the fields and roads into a white
shining splendour; the wind died and the stars peeped between the
flakes of whirling snow.

She sat without moving, accusing her heart of hardness, of unkindness.
She seemed to herself then deserving of every punishment. "If I had
only gone to him," she thought again and again. She remembered how she
had kept apart from him, enclosed herself in a reserve that he should
never break. She remembered the times when he had scolded her, coldly,
bitterly, and she had stood, her face as a rock, her heart beating but
her body without movement, then had turned and gone silently from the
room. All her wicked, cold heart that in some strange way cared for
love but could not make those movements towards others that would show
that it cared. What was it in her? Would she always, through life, miss
the things for which she longed through her coldness and obstinacy?

She took her father's photograph, stared at it, gazed into it, held it
in an agony of remorse. She shivered in the cold of her room but did
not know it. Her candle, caught in some draught, blew out, and
instantly the white world without leapt in upon her and her room was
lit with a strange unearthly glow. She saw nothing but her father. At
last she fell asleep in the chair, clutching in her hand the photograph.

Thus her aunt found her, later in the evening. She was touched by the
figure, the shabby black frock, the white tired face. She had been
honestly disappointed in her niece, disappointed in her plainness, in
her apparent want of heart, in her silence and moroseness. Mathew had
told her of the girl's outburst to him against her father, and this had
seemed to her shocking upon the very day after that father's death. Now
when she saw the photograph clenched in Maggie's hand tears came into
her eyes. She said, "Maggie! dear Maggie!" and woke her. Maggie,
stirring saw her aunt's slender figure and delicate face standing in
the snowlight as though she had been truly a saint from heaven.

Maggie's first impulse was to rise