cold world with her helpless children. Poverty
was in store for her; that she knew; and doubtless she foresaw many
another trouble, and, could she have chosen, would gladly have taken
her place there beside the one who, with all his faults, had been her
best friend on earth.

Her cold, formal religion was no comfort to her in moments like these.
She was a pagan at heart, and where she had laid her dead, there, to
her mind, he would rest for ever, far from her. The lonely grave on
the wild west coast was the shrine towards which her poor heart would
yearn thereafter at all times, always. She had erected a handsome
tombstone on the hallowed spot, and was going away in her shabby
clothes, the more at ease for the self-denial she had had to exercise
in order to beautify it. The radical difference between herself and
Beth, which was to keep them apart for ever, was never more apparent
than at this moment of farewell. The other children cried, but Beth
remained an unmoved spectator of her mother's emotion. She hated the
delay in that painful place; and what was the use of it when her
father would be with them just the same when they got into the yellow
coach which was waiting at the gate to take them away? Beth's beloved
was a spirit, near at hand always; her mother's was a corpse in a
coffin, buried in the ground.

A little way out of Castletownrock the coach was stopped, and Honor
and Kathleen Mayne from the inn came up to the window.

"We walked out to be the last to say good-bye to you, Mrs. Caldwell,
and to wish you good luck," Kathleen said. "We were among the first to
welcome you when you came. And we've brought a piece of music for Miss
Mildred, if she will accept it for a keepsake."

Mrs. Caldwell shook hands with them, but she could not speak; and the
coach drove on. The days when she had thought the two Miss Maynes
presumptuous for young women in their position seemed a long way off
to her as she sat there, sobbing, but grateful for this last act of
kindly feeling.

Beth had been eager to be off in the yellow coach, but they had not
long started before she began to suffer. The moving panorama of
desolate landscape, rocky coast, rough sea, moor and mountain, with
the motion of the coach, and the smell of stale tobacco and beer in
inn-parlours where they waited to change horses, nauseated her to
faintness. Her sensitive nervous system received too many vivid
impressions at once; the intense melancholy of the s