e there was nothing
to cheer her; there is not much consolation when one fails where it
seems quite easy for others to succeed.

Now that it became evident that she would be so little missed, she was
in haste to get the parting over and be gone. But her unadventurous
spirit shrank from going out in the world to manage by itself. She was
very doubtful what she should do. She would not have been welcomed by
Minna or Louie, even if she had wished to live with them. Her second
brother was in some inaccessible foreign place. Evelyn and Herbert were
also far out of reach. He had exchanged into a regiment which was
quartered at Halifax, in Canada.

But the distance, however great, might have been faced, if she had
not had a miserable quarrel with Herbert. It began with some
misunderstanding about the tombstone on the youngest little girl's
grave, to which Henrietta had wished to contribute. She had written to
Evelyn from the Riviera in all the soreness of worn-out nerves and grief
from which the sublimity has gone. The very fact that they had been
drawn so close to one another made her specially irritable to Evelyn.
After one or two of her letters, an answer came from Herbert:

"Evelyn is very ill from all she has been through, and the doctor says
it is most important that she should be kept from every sort of worry.
She was so much distressed at your last letter, and answering you took
so much out of her, that I have taken the liberty of keeping this one
from her. You have no right to write to her in this way, and I must ask
you to drop all correspondence for the present if your letters are to be
in the same strain."

Henrietta declared that he was trying to come between her and her
sister, and that if that was the case she should never trouble them
again. She did not write at all for several weeks, then she felt
remorseful, but Herbert could not forgive her. He wrote coldly that
Evelyn was still so unhinged as to be incapable of receiving letters
without undue excitement.

CHAPTER VII

Even now, when there is a certain amount of choice and liberty, a woman
who is thrown on her own resources at thirty-nine, with no previous
training, and no obvious claims and duties, does not find it very easy
to know how to dispose of herself. But a generation ago the problem was
far more difficult. Henrietta was well off for a single woman, but she
was incapable, and not easy to get on with. She would have thought it
derogat