hrine of
one of her gods. She opened the door, and closing it gently behind
her, she stood beside Carnaby's bed and looked at him, intently and
haggardly.

Mrs. de Tracy's was a singular character, as Mark Lavendar had said.
The circumstances of her widowhood with its heavy responsibilities had
perhaps hardly been fair to her. There had been little room for the
kindlier and softer feelings, though it is to be feared that they
would not have found much congenial soil in her heart. The personal
selfishness in her had long been merged in the greater and harder
selfishness of caste; she had become a mere machine for the keeping up
of Stoke Revel.

But to-night she was moved by the positively human sentiment which had
been stirred in her by Carnaby's startling act of cutting the plum
tree down. Ah! let fools believe if they could that she was angry with
the boy! She had never felt anger less or pride more. While others
talked and argued, shilly-shallied, made love, muddled and made
mistakes, her grandson, the man of the race that always ruled, had cut
the knot for himself, without hesitation and without compunction,
without consulting anyone or asking anyone's leave. That was the way
the de Tracys had always acted. And it seemed to Mrs. de Tracy a
crowning coincidence, a fitting kind of poetical justice, that
Carnaby's action should actually have prevented the sale of the land;
that dreaded, detestable sale of the first land that the de Tracys
had held upon the banks of the river.

So, since Carnaby was to be a man of the right kind, his grandmother
had come to look at him, not in love, as other women come to such
bedsides, but in pride of heart. The boy, after his "white night" at
Wittisham and the varied emotions of the succeeding day, lay on his
side, in the deep, recuperative sleep of youth whence its energies are
drawn and in which its vigors are renewed. His round cheek indented
the pillow, his rumpled hair stirred in the breeze that blew in at the
window, his arm and his open hand, relaxed, lay along the sheet.
Another woman would have straightened the bed-clothes above him;
another might have touched his hair or hand; another kissed his cheek.
But not even because he was like her departed husband, like the man
who five and fifty years before had courted a certain cold and proud,
handsome and penniless Miss Augusta Gallup, would Mrs. de Tracy do
these things. She had had her sensation, such as it was, her secret