at can ever be
between two human beings.... Test the world, if you will--and your
nature demands that you shall test it--but you will live to say one
day: 'My mother knew. My mother's words have come true.'"

It was even so. She knew now, at last, and the knowledge had come to
her when inexorable necessity compelled her to separate herself
forever from the man who, not suddenly, but by a system of gradual
evolution--from the crude emotions of her girlhood through the
growing consciousness of later years--had now manifested himself to
her as all her heart could desire, all her spirit could crave, all
her mature womanhood could need. She realized that he had long been
this to her, but with a thick veil between herself and him which had
hid the truth from her. The reading of the letter given her by Mr.
Cortlin had torn that veil apart, and she saw him as he was, the man
of her ideal. She did not, at the same moment, see her own heart as
it was. This vision had come to her with her renewed intercourse with
Horace, who had appeared before her now the ripe product of the noble
possibilities which she had vaguely perceived in him once, when she
had cared too little to think deeply of him in any way.

Oh, to have kept the place she had once had at his dear side! To have
shared with him the privations of a life that would have been narrow
and obscure indeed compared with the one which she had known in its
stead, but, oh, how rich in the way she had now come to count riches!

Thoughts like these she had to fight against. Perhaps in the end they
would conquer, and would hunt her to the death; but now, until she
could get out of the country, she must put them down.

She had only a few days left, and she determined to devote a part of
these to some farewell visits among the tenants. As far as she had
been able to do, she had made friends with these poor folk, and had
given what she could to relieve their necessities; but, in comparison
with what was needed, the money at her command had seemed pitifully
small.

When Lady Hurdly, dressed in her deep widow's mourning, descended the
steps of her stately residence and entered the waiting carriage,
whose black-liveried servants saluted her respectfully, she had a
consciousness that servants and tenants alike must feel a certain
commiseration for the great lady, such as they had known her, now
sunk to poverty as well as obscurity. This feeling made her manner a
little colder and prou