er mother's room, and made tea for
her, and left the two to compare notes with each other for half an hour.
Thus Mrs. Bundlecombe went away comforted, and took some comfort back
with her to the dingy room in Alfred Place.

It was hard for Lettice to turn to her work again, as though nothing had
happened since she last laid down her pen. The story to which she had
listened, and the picture which it brought so vividly before her mind of
the lonely, persecuted man who pined for her love when she had no right
to give it, nor he to ask for it, compelled her to realize what she had
hitherto fought away and kept in the background. She could no longer
cheat herself with the assurance that her heart was in her own keeping,
and that her feeling for Alan was one of mere womanly pity.

She loved him; and she would not go on lying to her own heart by saying
that she did not.

Her character was not by any means perfect; but, as with all of us, a
mixture of good and ill--the evil and the good often springing out of
the same inborn qualities of her nature. She had a keen sense of
enjoyment in hearing and seeing new things, in broaching new ideas and
entering upon fresh fields of thought; and her appetite in these
respects was all the stronger for the gloom and seclusion in which the
earlier years of her womanhood had been spent. She was lavish in
generosity to her friends, and did not count the cost when she wanted to
be kind. But as the desire for enjoyment may be carried to the length of
self-indulgence, so there is often a selfishness in giving and a
recklessness in being over kind. Lettice, moreover, was extravagant in
the further sense that she did not look much beyond the present month or
present year of existence. She thought her sun would always shine.

Her blemishes were quite compatible with her virtues, with the general
right-mindedness and brave performance of duty which had hitherto marked
her life. She was neither bad nor perhaps very good, but just such a
woman as Nature selects to be the instrument of her most mysterious
workings.

If Lettice admitted to herself the defeat which she had sustained in one
quarter, she was all the less disposed to accept a check elsewhere. Her
will to resist a hopeless love was broken down, but that only increased
the strength of her determination to conceal the weakness from every
eye, to continue the struggle of life as though there were no flaw in
her armor, and to work indefatigab