Mrs. Peyton murmured.
"Everything looks cheerful in the morning. Good night,--"I grow so
old,"--how dare you read me such a thing as that, Margaret Montfort? It
is an impertinence."

"Indeed," said Margaret, colouring, and now really wounded. "I do not
understand you at all to-day, Mrs. Peyton. I don't seem to be able to
please you, and it is time for me to go."

She rose, and the lady, her mood changing again in an instant, took her
two hands, and drew her close to her side.

"You are my only comfort," she said. "Do you hear that? You are the only
person in this whole dreadful place that I would give the half of a
burnt straw to see. Remember that, when I behave too abominably. Yes, go
now, for I am going to have a bad turn. Send Antonia; and come again
soon--soon, do you hear, Margaret? But remember--remember that the
poison-bowl waits for Sophronia!"

"What--shall I give her any message?" said poor Margaret, as she bent
to kiss the white forehead between the glittering waves of hair.

"Give her my malediction," said Mrs. Peyton. "Tell her it is almost a
consolation for lying here, to think I need not see her. Tell her
anything you like. Go now! Good-bye, child! Dear little quaint, funny,
prim child, good-bye!"

* * * * *

Margaret walked home sadly enough. She loved and admired her beautiful
friend, but she did not understand her, and there was much that she
could not approve. It seemed absurd, she often said to herself, for a
girl of her age to criticise, to venture to disapprove, of a woman old
enough to be her mother, one who had travelled the world over, and knew
plenty of human nature, if little of books. Yet, the thought would come
again, there was no age to right and wrong; and there were things that
it could not be right to think, or kind to say, at eighteen or at
eighty. And her uncle did not like Mrs. Peyton. Margaret felt that,
without his having ever put it into words. Still, she was so beautiful,
so fascinating,--and so kind to her! Perhaps, unconsciously, Margaret
did miss a good deal the two young cousins who had been with her during
her first year at Fernley; surely, and every hour, she missed her Aunt
Faith, whose tenderness had been that of the mother she had never known.

She was in no haste to go home; there was still an hour before Uncle
John would come. There was little peace at home in these days, but a
prying eye, and a tongue that was seldom still save