approval of this worthy
sentiment.

Sarah waved her hand to her brother, and stood watching him until the
motor was hidden behind the trees and a bend in a long avenue, and then
turned back to the house, her head bent towards the gravel-path, the
pebbles of which she kicked with her feet, to the distinct disapproval of
the young gardener who had just rolled it, and viewed this destruction of
his work from a distance.

'Ashamed of nothing but doing wrong!' she soliloquised. 'That's not true.
One is ashamed of having dirty hands or muddy boots; there's nothing
wrong in that.' She turned impulsively as if to say this to her brother,
and have the last word; but that being an impossibility, she was reduced
to arguing the question out with herself, as Sarah had a habit of doing.

The only person she ever consulted, or whose advice or criticism she
accepted, was her uncle Howroyd. But this question she could not ask him,
for Sarah hardly liked to own to herself that she was a little ashamed of
her uncle Howroyd; at least, not exactly ashamed, but she did not mean
to take Horatia Cunningham to see him or the old-fashioned mill-house in
which William Howroyd and his father had lived for three or four
generations.

So Sarah was reduced to herself as an authority upon this question for
the present, and not being by any means a safe authority, she did not get
a wise answer, which might have saved her a great deal of vexation and
annoyance; for Sarah decided that George was quite wrong. There were
things which were not wrong, and yet one could not help being ashamed of
them; and one thing Sarah was ashamed of was having parents who were not
only uneducated, but had unrefined ideas.

Sarah had one day-dream, absurd as it may seem, of which she never spoke.
Sarah always cherished the hope that she might some day find that she and
her brother were not really George and Sarah Clay, but adopted children
of Mark Clay, and that by-and-by the news would be broken to them. And
yet Sarah was a well-educated, intelligent girl of sixteen, and lived in
the twentieth century. The fancy arose from a remark her father once made
when she was quite a child: 'They are not my children; they are a cut
above me. They've got their mother's features, but they'll have nothing
of me but my money.' And upon this half-bitter, half-proud speech of Mark
Clay's Sarah built her romance, which varied as she invented different
explanations of the mystery from t