t be a great sorrow to her to be told
it?" said she uneasily. But all on her old guest's account--none on her
own.

Gwen felt that her first attempt to breach the fortress of
unconsciousness, had failed. She must lay a new sap, at another angle;
a slower approach, but a surer.

"Not a great sorrow so much as a great shock. You can help me to tell it
her so as to spare her." Gwen felt at this point the advantages of the
Feudal System. This good woman would never presume to hurry disclosure.
"You can help me, Mrs. Thrale, and I will tell you the whole. But I want
to know one or two things about what she said." Gwen produced Mrs.
Thrale's own letter from a dainty gilded wallet, and opened it. "I
understand that the very first appearance of these delusions--or
whatever they were--was when she saw the mill-model. Quite the very
first?"

"That was, like, the beginning of it," said Mrs. Thrale, recollecting.
"She asks me, was little Dave in the right about the wheel-sacks and the
water-cart, and I say to her the child is right, but should have said
wheat-sacks and water-mill. And then I get it down.... Yes, I get it
down and show it to her"--this slowly and reminiscently. "And then, my
lady, I look round, and there's the poor old soul, all of a twitter!"
This was accelerated, for dramatic force.

"You did not put it down to her seeing the mill?"

"No, my lady; I took it she was upset and tired, at her age. I've seen
the like before. Not my mother, but old Mrs. Dunage at the Rectory.
'Twas when the news came her mother was killed on the railway. She went
quite unconscious, and I helped to nurse her round. She was gone of
seventy-seven at the time."

"_That_ was a shock, then?" Gwen felt, although Widow Thrale did not
seem to have connected the two things together, that the mill had been
the agency that upset Mrs. Prichard.

But she had underestimated the strength of the fortress again. Mrs.
Thrale took it as a discrimination between the two cases. "Yes, my
lady," said she quietly. "That was a _shock_. But so you might say, this
was a shock, too. By reason of an idea, got on the mind. Dr. Nash said,
next day, certainly!"

"Very likely," said Gwen. "But what came next?"

"Well, now--how was it? I was seeing her to bed, unconscious like, and
she says to me, on the sudden:--'_Whose_ mill was it?' And then, of
course, I say grandfather's. For indeed, my lady, that is so! Mother has
had this model all her life, from when