would otherwise have ended
with her marriage. And this, from Mrs. Selwyn's egotistical point of
view, was all to the good, since Sara had acquired a pleasant habit of
making herself both useful and entertaining to the invalid.

Molly's emotions carried her to the other extreme of the compass. Since
the night when she had realized that she had narrowly missed making
entire shipwreck of her life, thanks to the evil genius of Lester Kent,
her character seemed to have undergone a change--to have deepened and
expanded. She was no longer so buoyantly superficial in her envisagement
of life, and the big things reacted on her in a way which would
previously have been impossible. Formerly, their significance would have
passed her by, and she would have floated airily along, unconscious of
their piercing reality.

Side by side with this increase of vision, there had developed a very
deep and sincere affection for both Garth and Sara based, probably, in
its inception, on her realization that whatever of good, whatever of
happiness, life might hold for her, she would owe it fundamentally to
the two who had so determinedly kept her heedless feet from straying
into that desert from which there is no returning to the pleasant paths
of righteousness. A censorious world sees carefully to that, for ever
barring out the sinner--of the weaker sex--from inheriting the earth.

So that to this new and awakened Molly the abrupt termination of Sara's
engagement came as something almost too overwhelming to be borne.
She did not see how Sara _could_ bear it, and to her youthful mind,
mercifully unwitting that grief is one of the world's commonplaces, Sara
was henceforth haloed with sorrow, set specially apart by the tragic
circumstances which had enveloped her. Unconsciously she lowered her
voice when speaking to her, infusing a certain specific sympathy into
every small action she performed for her, shrank from troubling her in
any way, and altogether, in her youth and inexperience, behaved rather
as though she were in a house of mourning, where the candles yet burned
in the chamber of death and the blinds shut out the light of day.

At last Sara rebelled, although compassionately aware of Molly's
excellent intentions.

"Molly, my angel, if you persist in treating me as though I had just
lost the whole of my relatives in an earthquake or a wreck at sea, I
shall explode. I've had a bad knock, but I don't want it continually
rubbing into me.