when you get up, Irene. She hasn't
slept well----"

"PLEASE don't talk! I'm almost DEAD with sleep!" returned Irene. "Do
go, mamma! I shan't disturb her." She turned her face down in the
pillow, and pulled the covering up over her ears.

The mother slowly closed the door and went downstairs, feeling
bewildered and baffled almost beyond the power to move. The time had
been when she would have tried to find out why this judgment had been
sent upon her. But now she could not feel that the innocent suffering
of others was inflicted for her fault; she shrank instinctively from
that cruel and egotistic misinterpretation of the mystery of pain and
loss. She saw her two children, equally if differently dear to her,
destined to trouble that nothing could avert, and she could not blame
either of them; she could not blame the means of this misery to them;
he was as innocent as they, and though her heart was sore against him
in this first moment, she could still be just to him in it. She was a
woman who had been used to seek the light by striving; she had hitherto
literally worked to it. But it is the curse of prosperity that it
takes work away from us, and shuts that door to hope and health of
spirit. In this house, where everything had come to be done for her,
she had no tasks to interpose between her and her despair. She sat
down in her own room and let her hands fall in her lap,--the hands that
had once been so helpful and busy,--and tried to think it all out. She
had never heard of the fate that was once supposed to appoint the
sorrows of men irrespective of their blamelessness or blame, before the
time when it came to be believed that sorrows were penalties; but in
her simple way she recognised something like that mythic power when she
rose from her struggle with the problem, and said aloud to herself,
"Well, the witch is in it." Turn which way she would, she saw no escape
from the misery to come--the misery which had come already to Penelope
and herself, and that must come to Irene and her father. She started
when she definitely thought of her husband, and thought with what
violence it would work in every fibre of his rude strength. She feared
that, and she feared something worse--the effect which his pride and
ambition might seek to give it; and it was with terror of this, as well
as the natural trust with which a woman must turn to her husband in any
anxiety at last, that she felt she could not wait for evenin