lity. Not that I feared the word service, considering what
Divine lips had said on that subject--"I am among you as one who
serveth--" but I knew how the world shrank from such terms.

I have always maintained that half the so-called difficulties of life
consist mainly in our dread of other people's opinions; women are
especially trammelled by this bondage. They breathe the atmosphere of
their own special world, and the chill wind of popular opinion blows
coldly over them; like the sensitive plant, they shiver and wither up at
a touch. I believe the master minds that achieve great things have
created their own atmosphere, else how can they appear so impervious to
criticism? How can they carry themselves so calmly, when their
contemporaries are sneering round them? We must live above ourselves and
each other; there is no other way of getting rid of the shams and
disguises of life; and yet how is one who has been born in slavery to be
absolutely true? How is an English gentlewoman to shake off the
prejudices of caste and declare herself free?

Ah, well! this was the enigma I had set myself to solve. And now the old
life--the protected girl's life--was receding from me; the old guards,
the old landmarks were to be removed by my own hands. Should I live to
repent my rash act, as Aunt Agatha predicted, or should I at some future
time, when I looked back upon this wintry day, thank God, humbly and
with tears of gratitude, that I had courage given me to see the right
and do it, "ad finem fidelis," faithful to the last?

* * * * *

I found those last few days of home-life singularly trying. Indeed, I am
not sure that I was not distinctly grateful when the final evening
arrived. When one has to perform a painful duty there is no use in
lingering over it; and when one is secretly troubled, a spoken and too
discursive sympathy only irritates our mental membrane. How could Job,
for example, tolerate the sackcloth and ashes, and, worse still, the
combative eloquence of his friends?

Aunt Agatha's pathetic looks and pitying words fretted me to the very
verge of endurance. I wished she would have been less mindful of my
comforts, that she would not have insisted on helping me with my sewing,
and loading me with little surprises in the shape of gifts. But for the
bitter cold that kept me an unwilling prisoner by the fireside, I would
have escaped into my own room to avoid the looks that seemed to foll