sseau. The mother lavished on her child
every inch of the old lace, every one of the treasured trinkets--even
the little old locket that had been the dead husband's first love-gift.

And Maisie, in the flutter of her excitement and anticipation, was
loving and tender and charming, and the mother had her reward.

Edward opposed a stolid and stony disapproval to all the new enthusiasm.
He said little because he feared to say too much.

"Poor little Maisie!" he said. "You'll soon find out that you didn't
know when you were well off."

"Edward, I hate you," said Maisie, and she thought she did.

But when all the beautiful new clothes were packed and her cab was at
the door, some sense of what she was leaving did come to the girl, and
she flung her arms round her mother in an embrace such as she had never
given in her life.

"I don't want to go," she cried. "Mummy darling, I've been a little
beast about it. I won't go if you say you'd rather not. Shall I send the
cab away? I will if you say so, my own dear old Mummy!"

Maisie's mother was not a very wise woman, but she was not fool enough
to trust this new softness.

"No, no, dearest," she said; "go and try your own way. God bless you, my
darling! You'll miss the train if you stay. God bless you, my darling!"

And Maisie went away crying hard through the new veil with the black
velvet spots on it; as for the mother--but she was elderly, and plain,
and foolishly fond, and her emotions can have but little interest for
the readers of romances.

And now Maisie, for the first time, knew the meaning of home. And before
she had been at Yalding a week she had learned to analyse home and to
give names to its constituents: love, interest, sympathy, liberty--these
were some.

At Yalding Towers Maisie was nothing to any one. No one knew or cared
one single little bit of a straw whether she was unhappy or no. Her time
was filled, and overfilled, by the attentions exacted by an old,
eccentric, and very disagreeable lady. When she put on, for the first
evening, the least pretty of the pretty dresses she had brought with
her, the old lady looked at her with a disapproval almost rising to
repulsion, and said: "I expect you to wear black; and a linen collar and
cuffs."

So another black dress had to be ordered from home, and all the pretty,
dainty things lay creasing themselves with disuse in the ample drawers
and cupboards of her vast, dreary bedroom.

Her employer was exacti