d. On looking through the
washing, Miss Day had exclaimed in horror at the way in which her
stockings were mended.

"Whoever did it? They've been done since you left here. I would never
have passed such dams."

Laura crimsoned. "Those? Oh, an old nurse we've got at home. We've had
her for years and years--but her eyesight's going now."

Miss Day sniffed audibly. "So I should think. To cobble like that!"

They were Mother's dams, hastily made, late at night, and with all
Mother's genial impatience at useful sewing as opposed to beautiful.
Laura's intention had been to shield Mother from criticism, as well as
to spare Miss Day's feelings. But to have done it so clumsily as this!
To have had to wince under Miss Day's scepticism! It was only a wonder
the governess had not there and then taxed her with the fib. For who
believed in old nurses nowadays? They were a stock property, borrowed
on the spur of the moment from readings in THE FAMILY HERALD, from
Tennyson's LADY CLARE. Why on earth had such a far-fetched excuse leapt
to her tongue? Why could she not have said Sarah, the servant, the
maid-of-all-work? Then Miss Day would have had no chance to sniff, and
she, Laura, could have believed herself believed, instead of having to
fret over her own stupidity.--But what she would like more than
anything to know was, why the mending of the stockings at home should
NOT be Sarah's work? Why must it just be Mother--her mother alone--who
made herself so disagreeably conspicuous, and not merely by darning the
stockings, but, what was a still greater grievance, by not even darning
them well?

XI.

It was an odd thing, all the same, how easy it was to be friends with
Lilith Gordon: though she did not belong to Laura's set though Laura
did not even like her, and though she had had ample proof that Lilith
was double-faced, not to be trusted. Yet, in the months that followed
the affair of the purple dress, Laura grew more intimate with the
plump, sandy-haired girl than with either Bertha, or Inez, or Tilly.
Or, to put it more exactly, she was continually having lapses into
intimacy, and repenting them when it was too late. In one way Lilith
was responsible for this: she could make herself very pleasant when she
chose, seem to be your friend through thick and thin, thus luring you
on to unbosom yourself; and afterwards she would go away and laugh over
what you had told her, with other girls. And Laura was peculiarly
helples