y a maid before, was wondering how long this
wretched life was to last, and how any one was ever happy. Faith bruised
and trust misplaced blotted out for her the joy of living and the
exultation of youth. If these things were true, why did the sun shine,
and how could the world be merry? If these things were true, for her the
sun shone no more, and the merriment was stilled for ever. So she
thought, and, if she were not right, it needed a philosopher to tell her
so; and then she would not have believed him, but caught her woe closer
to her heart, and nursed it with fiercer tenderness against his shallow
prating. Perhaps he might have told her too, that it is cruel kindness
unasked to set people on a pinnacle, and, when they cannot keep foothold
on that slippery height, to scorn their fall. Other things such an one
might well have said, but more wisely left unsaid; for cool reason is a
blister to heartache, and heartache is not best cured by blisters. Never
yet did a child stop crying for being told its pain was nought and would
soon be gone. Yet this prescription had been Lady Eynesford's--although
she was no philosopher, to her knowledge--for Alicia, and it had left
the patient protesting that she felt no pain at all, and yet feeling it
all the more.

"What do you accuse me of? Why do you speak to me?" she had burst out.
"What is it to me what he has done or not done? What do you mean, Mary?"

Before this torrent of questions Lady Eynesford tactfully retreated a
little way. A warning against hasty love dwindled to an appeal whether
so much friendliness, such constant meetings, either with daughter or
with father, were desirable.

"I'm sure I'm sorry for the poor child," she said; "but in this
world----"

"Suppose it's all a slander!"

"My dear Alicia, do they say such things about a man in his position
unless there's something in them?"

"It's nothing to me," said Alicia again.

"Of course, you can do nothing abrupt; but you'll gradually withdraw
from their acquaintance, won't you?"

Alicia had escaped without a promise, pleading for time to think in the
same breath that she denied any concern in the matter. She was by way of
thinking now, and all that Lady Eynesford had said repeated itself in
her mind as she looked out on the garden and the glimpses of the town
beyond. She understood now Dick's banishment, her sister-in-law's
unresting hostility to the Medlands, and the reason why she had been
pressed to go