send my father's dispatch box and sword-case and my own
dispatch boxes in a cab. Would you mind taking them and having them put
in the little room next to my bed-room?"

But in the end Molly had taken them herself, as she thought Miss Carew
had a slight cold. Miss Carew always had a certain dislike to the door
of the little room next to Molly's, which had evidently been once used
for a powder closet. She did not even know if the door were locked or
not, and she never touched the handle. She had an uncanny horror of
passing the door, at least so she said afterwards; probably in
retrospect she came to exaggerate her feelings as to these things.

She was puzzled and confused: her health was not good, and her faculties
were dimmed. It was probably the strain of living with Molly whom she
could no longer control or guide, and who was so evidently in dire need
of some one to do both. She felt dreadfully burdened with
responsibility, both as to the things she did understand and the things
she did not understand. What she could not understand was a sense of
moral darkness, like a great, looming grey cloud, sometimes simply dark
and heavy, and at other times a cloud electric with coming danger. She
felt as if burdened with a secret which she longed to impart, only that
she did not know what it was. At times it was as if she carried some
monstrous thing on her back, whilst she could only see its dark,
shapeless shadow. Her self-confidence was going, and her culture was so
useless. What good was it to her now to know really well the writings of
Burke, or Macaulay--nay, of Racine and Pascal? She had never been
religious since her childhood, but in these long, solitary days in the
great house that grew more and more gloomy as she passed about it when
Molly was out, she began to feel new needs and to seek for old helps.

Molly was sometimes struck by the change in her companion. Miss Carew
seemed to have grown so futile, so incoherent and funny, unlike the Miss
Carew who had been her finishing governess not many years ago.

The sight of Carey's troubled, mottled face began to irritate Molly to
an unbearable degree.

"Why not have a treatment for eczema and have done with it? You used to
have quite a clear skin," she cried, in brutal irritation one morning.

"Oh! it's nerves--merely nerves," said poor Miss Carew apologetically.

"Then have a treatment for nerves," cried Molly furiously. "It is too
ridiculous to have blotches on