w the surface nor concerned itself with motives; and if any one had
suggested to him that she was inexplicable he would have considered
such a judgment quite unintelligible. He enjoyed a visit to her more
than almost anything else in the world. She had always been devoted to
him ever since he was a boy, and for the life of him he could not see
that she was difficult to understand.

It was the fashion to say that Mrs. Ogilvie had altered greatly since
the death of Colonel Ogilvie and the little boy. People who remembered
all the circumstances of that sad time thought always that in her own
way Mrs. Ogilvie was the victim of remorse for not having loved her
dead child better. But, after all, there was nothing that a child of
three or four years old could have felt seriously in his mother's
conduct, and his father's affection must have consoled him for any
coldness on her part. After the colonel's death there were those who
said it would have been better if Mrs. Ogilvie had married again, or
even if she had had a daughter--some one who would have been always at
home, and who, to use the common phrase, might have taken Mrs. Ogilvie
out of herself. Peter was too much away from home to be a real
companion to his mother, and there were never guests at Bowshott unless
he was there. It would surely have been in reason if the widow had
taken a fancy to some nice girl and had had her to live in the house.
But Mrs. Ogilvie did not take fancies to nice girls. She loved Jane
Erskine, but disguised the feeling under a sort of whimsical
indifference. And the friendship seemed incongruous enough if one came
to think of it. Jane, with her wholesome love of outdoor life, her
fresh beauty, her heedlessness of learning and ignorance of books--what
had Jane in common with Mrs. Ogilvie in her Parisian gowns and with her
dyed hair, sitting in the vast drawing-room at Bowshott reading the
_Court Journal_ and thinking on the lines of the speculative
philosophers?

And even to Jane Erskine her manner was cold. Her chilling philosophy
would soon have quenched a less happy and impulsive nature. No one but
Jane would have bothered her head about Mrs. Ogilvie, the kindly
neighbours said, envying, nevertheless, the girl's intimacy at the
great house. But as a matter of fact Jane expended a wealth of honest
affection on Mrs. Ogilvie, and not only thought her the cleverest woman
she had ever met, but had even been heard to affirm that her