shook so with suppressed agitation that the saucer slipped from
her grasp, and the next moment the costly china lay in fragments at
her feet.

"Dear! dear!--how dreadfully careless of me!" fumed Miss Mewlstone.

But Mrs. Cheyne made no observation. She only rang the bell, and
ordered another cup. But, when the servant had withdrawn, she said,
coldly,--

"Your hand is not as steady as usual this evening, Barby;" and somehow
the sharp incisive tone cut so keenly that, to Phillis's alarm, Miss
Mewlstone became very pale, and then suddenly burst into tears.

"This is too much!" observed Mrs. Cheyne, rising in serious
displeasure. She had almost a masculine abhorrence to tears of late
years; the very sight of them excited her strangely.

"Miss Challoner may keep her mysteries to herself if she likes, but I
insist on knowing what has upset you like this."

"Oh dear! oh, dear!" sobbed the simple woman, wringing her hands
helplessly. "This is just too much for me! Poor soul, how am I to tell
her?" And then she looked at Phillis in affright at her own words,
which revealed so much and so little.

Mrs. Cheyne turned exceedingly pale, and a shadow passed over her
face.

"'Poor soul!' does she mean me? Is it of me you are speaking, Barby?
Is there something for me to know, that you dread to tell me? Poor
soul, indeed!" And then her features contracted and grew pinched. "But
you need not be afraid. Is it not the Psalmist who says, 'All thy
waves and thy billows have gone over me'? Drowned people have nothing
to fear: there is no fresh trouble for them." And her eyes took an
awful stony look that terrified Phillis.

"Oh, it is no fresh trouble!" stammered the girl. "People are not
tormented like that: they have not to suffer more than they can
bear."

But Mrs. Cheyne turned upon her fiercely:

"You are wrong, altogether wrong. I could not bear it, and it drove me
mad,--at least as nearly mad as a sane woman could be. I felt my
reason shaken; my brain was all aflame, and I cried out to heaven for
mercy; and a blank answered me. Barby, if there be fresh trouble, tell
me instantly, and at once. What do I care? What is left to me, but a
body that will not die, and a brain that will not cease to think? If I
could only stop the thoughts! if I could only go down into silence and
nothingness! but then I should not find Herbert and the children.
Where are they? I forget!" She stopped, pressed her hands to her brow
with a strang