al taint from generation to generation, become temples of which
the very walls breathe nobleness, whereas the very birthplace of genius
itself becomes a butcher's shop; and though that genius be Shakespeare,
and the old house be some day purified seventy times seven, and
garnished as you please, the smell of slaughtered beasts will still
cling about its rooms, and the butcher insist upon immortality too.

Jenny's old mother was soon to turn into a memory also. She had from
time to time declared that she would not see another May, and had indeed
on one occasion named the day on which she would die, with a curious
precision, as though she had seen it written somewhere in a book, or
learnt it from private or unimpeachable information. Latterly she had
met Jenny twice in full daylight on the stairs, and it was evident that
the old woman would soon complete that little family circle in Paradise.

But she still kept about, and whereas her old husband had grown sleepier
as his end neared, she seemed to be growing more active again, fidgety
and restless. She slept badly, and returned to her old habit of being
first down in the morning and lighting the kitchen fire, in spite of
remonstrances. Indeed, she might sometimes be heard up in the middle of
the night, making herself a cup of tea in the kitchen. The kitchen had
been her world, and she was already beginning to haunt it.

There it was one wintry morning they found her sitting in the old
arm-chair in which her husband had died, and then they recalled her
words, for she had died on the very day she had predicted.

She knew nothing of books, this quaint old woman, and had a very
antiquated taste in wall-papers; yet there would seem to be other ways
of being wise, and it may indeed be held that books act too much as
insulators between us and the earth, to the mysterious currents of which
gnarled shapes of unlettered old men and women may be the more sensitive
as lying closer to the Mother.

At all events, old Mrs. Talbot did seem to have won certain confidences
from life and death refused to more consciously alert ears. Hers had
been that hearing beyond listening to which secrets are
sometimes revealed.

Her death was more of a loss to her son-in-law than he might have
conceived, for not only was she the last of Jenny's flesh and blood, but
she was the only one else in the world who missed Jenny as he missed
her. Others might, through sympathy, share his sorrow, but she an