sion for the present;
but the episode only strengthened her underlying sense of a mystery
somewhere in the matter to unravel.

In time, Herminia sent her child to a day-school. Though she had
always taught Dolly herself as well as she was able, she felt it a
matter of duty, as her daughter grew up, to give her something more
than the stray ends of time in a busy journalist's moments of
leisure. At the school, where Dolly was received without question,
on Miss Smith-Water's recommendation, she found herself thrown much
into the society of other girls, drawn for the most part from the
narrowly Mammon-worshipping ranks of London professional society.
Here, her native tendencies towards the real religion of England,
the united worship of Success and Respectability, were encouraged
to the utmost. But she noticed at times with a shy shrinking that
some few of the girls had heard vague rumors about her mother as a
most equivocal person, who didn't accept all the current
superstitions, and were curious to ask her questions as to her
family and antecedents. Crimson with shame, Dolly parried such
enquiries as best she could; but she longed all the more herself to
pierce this dim mystery. Was it a runaway match?--with the groom,
perhaps, or the footman? Only the natural shamefacedness of a
budding girl in prying into her mother's most domestic secrets
prevented Dolores from asking Herminia some day point-blank all
about it.

But she was gradually becoming aware that some strange atmosphere
of doubt surrounded her birth and her mother's history. It filled
her with sensitive fears and self-conscious hesitations.

And if the truth must be told, Dolly never really returned her
mother's profound affection. It is often so. The love which
parents lavish upon their children, the children repay, not to
parents themselves, but to the next generation. Only when we
become fathers or mothers in our turn do we learn what our fathers
and mothers have done for us. Thus it was with Dolly. When once
the first period of childish dependence was over, she regarded
Herminia with a smouldering distrust and a secret dislike that
concealed itself beneath a mask of unfelt caresses. In her heart
of hearts, she owed her mother a grudge for not having put her in a
position in life where she could drive in a carriage with a
snarling pug and a clipped French poodle, like Aunt Ermyntrude's
children. She grew up, smarting under a sullen sense o