down radiant. At dinner she spoke
exultingly of her approaching freedom. She would tear off her widow's weeds
and deck herself in the flower of youth. She would plunge into the great
swelling sea of Life. She would drink sunshine and fill her soul with
laughter. She would do a million hyperbolic things, the mention of which
mightily confused her mother. "I, my dear," said the hen in the fairy tale,
"never had the faintest desire to get into water." So, more or less, said
Mrs. Oldrieve.

"Will you miss me very dreadfully?" asked Zora.

"Of course," but her tone was so lacking in conviction that Zora laughed.

"Mother, you know very well that Cousin Jane will be a more sympathetic
companion. You've been pining for her all this time."

Cousin Jane held distinct views on the cut of under-clothes for the
deserving poor, and as clouds disperse before the sun so did household dust
before her presence. Untidiness followed in Zora's steps, as it does in
those of the physically large, and Cousin Jane disapproved of her
thoroughly. But Mrs. Oldrieve often sighed for Cousin Jane as she had never
sighed for Zora, Emily, or her husband. She was more than content with the
prospect of her companionship.

"At any rate, my dear," she said that evening, as she paused, candle in
hand, by her bedroom door, "at any rate I hope you'll do nothing that is
unbecoming to a gentlewoman."

Such was her benison.

Zora bumped her head against the oak beam that ran across her bedroom
ceiling.

"It's quite true," she said to herself, "the place is too small for me, I
don't fit."

* * * * *

What she was going to do in this wide world into whose glories she was
about to enter she had but the vaguest notion. All to her was the Beautiful
Unknown. Narrow means had kept her at Cheltenham and afterwards at
Nunsmere, all her life. She had met her husband in Ipswich while she was
paying a polite visit to some distant cousins. She had married him offhand,
in a whirl of the senses. He was a handsome blackguard, of independent
means, and she had spent her nightmare of a honeymoon at Brighton. On three
occasions, during her five-and-twenty years of existence, she had spent a
golden week in London. That was all she knew of the wide world. It was not
very much. Reading had given her a second-hand acquaintance with the doings
of various classes of mankind, and such pictures as she had seen had filled
her head with dreams of