really her own, and that she cared to keep
either for its own sake or because it had belonged to someone she had
loved? An awful sense of loneliness swept over her as she looked round
and could think of nothing. Each beautiful thing on walls or tables that
she looked at seemed repulsive in its turn, for it had either belonged
to Madame Danterre or been bought with her money. There was not so much
as a letter which she cared ever to see again. She had burnt Edmund's
few notes when she first came to Westmoreland House.

She had once met a woman who had lost everything in a fire. "I have
everything new," she wailed, "nothing that I ever had before--not a
photograph, not a prayer-book, nor an old letter. I don't feel that I am
the same person." The words came back now. "Not the same person," and
suddenly a sense of relief began to dawn upon her.

"Alone to land upon that shore
With not one thing that we have known before."

Oh, the immensity of such a mercy! That hymn had made her shiver as a
child; how different it seemed now! Molly knelt down by the couch, and
her shoulders trembled as a tempest of feeling came over her. Criminals
hardened by long lives of fraud have been known to be happier after
being found out--simply because the strain was over. They had destroyed
their moral sense. Molly's conscience was alive, though torn, bleeding,
and debased. She could not be happy as they were, but yet there was the
lifting of the weight as of a great mountain rolled away. She was afraid
of the immense sense of relief that now seemed coming upon her. Could
she really become free of the horrible Molly of the last months--this
noxious, vile, lying, thieving woman? What an awful strain that woman
had lived in! She had told Mark that what frightened her was the thought
that she would still be herself. She longed now to cut away everything
that had belonged to her. Might she not by God's grace, in poverty and
hard work, with everything around her quite different from the past,
might she not quite do to death the Molly who had lived in Westmoreland
House? The cry was more passionate than spiritual perhaps, but the
longing had its power to help. She rose and again moved quietly about
the room of the dead, bad woman, which must be left in order for the new
owners. She put some things together--what was necessary for a night or
two--and felt almost glad that she had a comb and brush she had not yet
used. There was a bag with