d
cannot last forever."

Evelyn stood for a moment undecided. Her mother's calm self-control had
not deceived her. She was no longer a child. It was a woman reading a
woman. All her lifetime came back to her to interpret this moment. In
the reaction of the second, the deepest pain was no longer for herself,
nor even for Miss McDonald, but for a woman who showed herself so
insensible to noble feeling. Protest was useless. But why was the
separation desired? She did not fully see, but her instinct told her
that it had a relation to her mother's plans for her; and as life
rose before her in the society, in the world, into which she was newly
launched, she felt that she was alone, absolutely alone. She tried to
speak, but before she could collect her thoughts her mother said:

"There, go now. It is useless to discuss the matter. We all have to
learn to bear things."

Evelyn went away, in a tumult of passion and of shame, and obeyed her
impulse to go where she had always found comfort.

Miss McDonald was in her own room. Her trunk was opened. She had taken
her clothes from the closet. She was opening the drawers and laying one
article here and another there. She was going from closet to bureau,
opening this door and shutting that in her sitting-room and bedroom, in
an aimless, distracted way. Out of her efforts nothing had so far come
but confusion. It seemed an impossible dream that she was actually
packing up to go away forever.

Evelyn entered in a haste that could not wait for permission.

"Is it true?" she cried.

McDonald turned. She could not speak. Her faithful face was gray with
suffering. Her eyes were swollen with weeping. For an instant she seemed
not to comprehend, and then a flood of motherly feeling overcame her.
She stretched out her arms and caught the girl to her breast in a
passionate embrace, burying her face in her neck in a vain effort to
subdue her sobbing.

What was there to say? Evelyn had come to her refuge for comfort, and
to Evelyn the comforter it was she herself who must be the comforter.
Presently she disengaged herself and forced the governess into an easy
chair. She sat down on the arm of the chair and smoothed her hair and
kissed her again and again.

"There. I'm going to help you. You'll see you have not taught me for
nothing." She jumped up and began to bustle about. "You don't know what
a packer I am."

"I knew it must come some time," she was saying, with a weary air, as
sh