ure you. I think, if you
will permit me to say it, that you were always a little unjust in your
judgment of Mrs. Saulsbury. She is a true-hearted and excellent woman."

Minola said nothing. Perhaps she felt that she never had been quite in a
position to do impartial justice to the excellence and the
true-heartedness of Mrs. Saulsbury.

"But," Mr. Sheppard resumed, with a gentle motion of his hands, as if he
would wave away now all superfluous and hopeless controversy, "that was
not what I came to say."

Minola bowed slightly to signify that she was glad to know he was coming
to the point at last.

"Mrs. Saulsbury is in very weak health, Miss Grey; something wrong with
the lungs, I fear."

Minola was not much impressed at first. It was one of Mrs. Saulsbury's
ways to cry "wolf" very often, as regarded the condition of her lungs,
and up to the time of Minola's leaving, people had not been in serious
expectation of the wolf's really putting his head in at the door.

Mr. Sheppard saw in Minola's face what she did not say.

"It is something really serious," he said. "Mr. Saulsbury knows it and
every one. You have not been in correspondence with them for some time,
Miss Grey."

"No," said Miss Grey. "I wrote, and nobody answered my letter."

"I am afraid it was regarded as--as----"

"Undutiful perhaps?"

"Well--unfriendly. But Mrs. Saulsbury now fears--or rather knows, for
she is too good a woman to fear--that the end is nigh, and she wishes to
be in fullest reconciliation with every one."

"Oh, has she sent for me?" Minola said, with something like a cry, all
her coldness and formality vanishing with her contempt. "I'll go, Mr.
Sheppard--oh, yes, at once! I did not know--I never thought that she was
really in any danger."

Poor Minola! With all her wild-bird freedom and her pride in her lonely
independence and her love of London, there yet remained in her that
instinct of home, that devotion to the principle of family and
authority, that she would have done homage at such a moment, and with
something like enthusiasm, to even such a simulacrum of the genius of
home as she had lately known. Something had passed through her mind that
very day as she talked with Heron, and feared she had talked too freely:
something that had made her think with vague pain of yearning on the
sweetness of a sheltered home. Her heart beat as she thought, "I will go
to her--I will go home; I will try to love her."

Mr. Sheppard dis