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saw his face just now, and, Madeleine, I can see who he is."

"Nonsense, Theodora. Stop. Tell me what were you doing in the passage ?"

"Put your arms round me first, Madeleine. There-it was about the shoes. You know how Wynne wanted them, and I couldn't give them up because mother made them for me. At least I thought I couldn't. But whilst I was on the rug, and you and Gladys were quite still in bed, mother came to me and said

"Now, Theodora, you know that's impossible; mother's away." "I'm certain mother said, 'Theodora, I want your little red shoes ; I want them for Wynne.' Then she went away, that was just before you called me, Madeleine, and when you called I ran off to Wynne's room, and he was fast asleep in bed, so I put the shoes beside him on his pillow, and he'll be glad to find them there in the morning, won't he? He can have them if he likes, because mother said, 'Theodora, I want your red shoes; I want them for Wynne.' But I ran back as fast as I could; and oh! I wish I had not looked up at the window as I passed. There was a man's face close to the pane looking in; he leaned across from the crooked branch of the appletree, and it is Uncle Llewellyn, I know it is."

"But you never saw Uncle Llewellyn, Theodora; at least, he went away before you can remember."

"I saw him last summer, Madeleine, outside our garden by the river. It was Uncle Llewellyn who caught the dear little fish, do you remember, and gave him to me."

"You never said so, Theodora. Did mother know? Why did you not tell us?"

"I didn't mean to tell," said Theodora, and suddenly she became silent.

I could get nothing more out of her; and she never mentioned Uncle Llewellyn to me again.

The spring that succeeded that winter came on slowly. A long time stretched between that Christmas Eve and-the end of our childhood, when the child left us I mean, Theodora,-for childhood itself lay down and died when Theodora died,-shut its eyes for ever to Gladys and me. The spring was slow in coming. I am glad to remember how slowly it seemed to come-that each day took a long time to pass, with its many daylight hours, infinitely precious hours, that were shared by us with Theodora. The sun seemed always to be shining; the sky was pale and clear; the wind was bitterly cold; yet mother never noticed Theo's husky voice, or called her indoors even on the chilliest days.

In the middle of March a missioner came into our neighbourhood, and a mission was held in the parish next to ours. Our stepfather took no part in it, and it did not interest Gladys or me in the least. It was not like mother to go so often to services as she did during the ten days the mission lasted. She was restless. I know now for what reason; but then I did not understand. When she used to look in at our playroom about tea-time every evening with her hat on and her furs, looking so beautiful-O mother!

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every evening Thee looked up and sprang from her seat when mother spoke whether the meal was finished, or half over, or just begun, it made no difference-scrambled into her rough old ulster and round hat, and put her little hand in mother's, or clattered down-stairs after her and caught her up in the passage. Thank you, thank you, dear little Thee! I thank you now from this long way off that you never let our mother go alone. Sometimes mother and Thee would be a long time away, beyond dinnertime, beyond Thee's bed-time, until the cold March twilight was dwindling into darkness. The last evening they went there was snow on the ground. Thee had a wretched cold. I heard her go up to bed by the noise her cough made. She crept up the dark staircase along the passage with

out looking in at us in the playroom, it was so very late that night. I heard her go along, coughing the little hard cough. It was the last time her footsteps ever trudged past our play-room door. Yet it was not until Theodora had been three days in bed that our mother became frightened about her. It seemed as if a cloud obscured us all from mother then. And this lasted until the third day of Thee's illness. Then in a flash she came back to us, all on fire with love and pain, and never left the bedside of the little one; but then there was nothing she could do, and by the evening of the fifth day Theodora lay still and white and silent, and never lifted a loving look into the passionate mother-eyes again.

"Only a little child,
Stone-cold upon a bed."

CHAPTER II.-MOTHER.

Gladys and I have often said to one another that we know all about being mothers without experience of our own. Our mother showed us everything. I don't remember that she ever said a word about what mothers feel, or what mothers should do, but she just was mother. It is difficult to think of her in any other relation, though there was another aspect of her which forced itself upon us at the last. But now I am going back to the beginning, to my very first recollections of her, and calling up pictures that glow and breathe and are alive in mind and heart.

"Isn't mother beautiful?" Gladys put the feeling into words. It was on one glorious summer morning, a day such as comes not oftener than a few times in many years, when every curtain seems undrawn between earth and

heaven. —a marriage-day of sunlight on earth and joy unveiling itself from the inner sphere. Gladys and I, running in from the garden to the breakfast-room, stopped in the doorway for a moment. I held Gladys back to look at the picture inside. The room was bathed in light, but the breakfast-table was drawn on one side into an alcove in the shade: there were large vases of roses on the table, the scent from them came to us at the open door. Mother stood at the head of the table in the light near the open window, tall and bending a little over the urn-her rippling auburn hair glowed like the sun. She made me think of my favourite story of the summer goddess, Iduna, in her grove of perpetual sunshine, standing ready to receive the heroes and feed them with her apples of

youth.

"Isn't mother beautiful?' "O Gladys! isn't she, just?" and we rushed upon her and disturbed the picture that has never faded from my memory.

Mother was beautiful, and she had nourished us with her beauty all the years we had lived until that morning, but we never knew about it until then, not until Gladys gave words to the unacknowledged long delight. How dignified she was too! and she threw her regal robes about us all. Ah mother! since you left us Gladys and I have had to sit in the dust like little beggar children we learned to wait about for smiles and love, cast from our palace to the dunghill on one dreadful day. Mother knew our faults in the secretest place of her own heart, and instinctively we knew that she knew, but her words were generally "Of course my children will do what is right," and no one approached us with blame. I am

not going to analyse the feeling she had about us, far less to criticise her plan, if indeed her bringing up of us could be said to have been the carrying out of any plan. "Mother knows," we acknowledged in everything that befell us: that was enough for us then, and it satisfies me now. So that in what way we might have been different under different training I don't care to ask or wonder. "Never regret anything," I read somewhere or heard somebody say, "or wish that at any moment the course of your life had branched off in a different direction; there never could have been an alternative." Certainly I cannot wish our mother's course ever to have been blown aside by the smallest breath of change. It was an atmosphere that she created for us. It seemed as if by the force of her will she held every influence in check around us, and left a clear space

for us to live in that was absolute

freedom. We felt free to be ourselves, whatever we were that we showed. There was no hurry in our lives; but that is the common experience of childhood. How long a time there is to grow up in, how one may dawdle over every task, how careless we can afford to be of our pleasures! We gather our flowers and throw them away. What does it matter? There will be flowers and flowers to-morrow and the next day and the next and the day after that, and sunshine through summers that stretch so far before us they seem to have no end. There was no hurry, no fear, no constraint in our lives, but around us an elastic air that nourished us, and mother's personality above all, shining like an unclouded sun in our sky, always to turn to.

I cannot remember mother's face ever being clouded towards me, and once only to Gladys. It made Gladys unhappy for years afterwards, if she thought of the one night when mother refused to kiss her in bed. As for our little Theodora, she would have moped and dwindled in any other home than ours. But mother's face could wear clouds towards other people. I have called her dignified: she was proud. And there was something in her which I understand now, for the same instinct moves in me now and then; she could be almost fierce in her defence of

us when any person or event seemed likely to invade the free ground on which she willed that we should grow.

I recall with especial vividness one little scene. In early spring I was always restless; it is the same with me now. Our earthmother moves in her sleep on the first soft day in February, then turns and sleeps again; and her later sleep is the dream-sleep that

comes before full awakening. On that particular February day which comes every year without fail though every one does not notice it, I observe - an indescribable longing takes possession of those who do notice it, and who feel the

pulse throb. The throb goes through me, and the feeling now takes up into it thought and hope and purpose; but when I was a child it remained a movement only, leading nowhere, and only making me restless, as I said before. When the day fell on a holiday (half of our days were holidays) it was all right; when it fell in school-time, I was in the habit of telling our daily governess that, as far as I was concerned, her coming that morning was a useless trouble, as I was unable to sit still, or practise my music or learn a lesson. I generally wandered from room to room, or slipped out alone to the river-side, and felt the swelling willow-buds and watched the lifesparkle of the running water. If it fell on a Sunday.—It did fall on a Sunday one day that I can remember. Every one got ready to go to church just as usual. How odd it seemed !-for what had the earth or I to do with Sundays and church-going? This was a day of new creation; how could it be one of stale habit as well? When the family were assembled in the hall, mother, Gladys, Wynne, Theodora, and our stepfather, in his clerical dress and with his precise air, came out from his study, it was noticed that I was missing. Mother, by some sort of instinct I suppose, knew what I was feeling, and what I intended not to do. "Never mind Madeleine," I heard her say. "She isn't coming to church to-day." "Not coming to church! Madeleine."

The words, in my stepfather's

VOL. CXLIX.-NO. DCCCCIII.

low measured tones, reached me in the drawing-room, and I stepped forward and faced the group.

"Are you aware that you keep us waiting, Madeleine," my stepfather said, coldly, "and that we are all ready to go to church?"

"But I am not going," I calmly replied, far too much elated by my own feelings to mind what I said. Then came reproof in stern tones; but I did not hear the words, I only felt my mother's quick and angry answer, and saw her eyes flash defiance at her husband, and knew that my freedom was secured.

From moods of our stepfather which I noted afterwards, I can believe that our mother was made to suffer through many days by any such championship of us. But of that we saw nothing and thought nothing: we got our way, and mother filled the place she seemed meant to fill in the world, that of securing for us all that we particularly wanted to have or enjoy. Yet another aspect of her than in her relation to us was forced upon us towards the end, and here I must disentangle my recollections in order to trace how it began. There was a day one autumn, the day of a garden-feast, the day when Theodora got the little fish, and loved it with all her heart for an hour or so. It was from that day that I used to date a change in mother; not that I noticed it at the time, but that in looking back months afterwards and comparing "now " with "as it used to be "I could see that the dividing-line lay there. I suppose that mother kissed us in bed just as tenderly that night as she was wont to do, and was as much occupied as usual with the pose of each little pillow; we could not probe below the surface or see the All that had ache in the heart.

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happened I even now do not know, but that some care was haunting mother's life began to ooze out little by little, and became very plain to us after Theodora died.

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Madeleine," Gladys said to me one evening across the schoolroom tea-table in a half aside, though there was only Wynne to hear, and he was quite absorbed with fruit and cream, "Uncle Llewellyn has come back."

I remembered what Theodora had told me on Christmas Eve, yet I contested the suggestion vehemently.

"Impossible! Gladys," I exclaimed. "Mother had a letter from Queensland yesterday. Uncle Llewellyn's letters come from Queensland, you know."

"Did mother say anything?" "Yes; she looked at our father and said, 'From Llewellyn.""

Gladys was staggered for a moment. "Poor mother!" she said by-and-by. "There's something horrid happening about Uncle Llewellyn, Madeleine, depend upon it."

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'People cannot be in two places at once," I replied, and buried myself in my story-book again.

Reading and schoolroom teadrinking went on together, and spread over long periods of time with us. What Gladys had said sank into my mind, and by-andby filled me with a vague horror. Gladys used to notice things and pick up facts, and relieve her memory of these and go her way. In my mind the little seeds of fact she scattered grew up into histories, amongst which my speculation wandered as one might wander under great forest-trees, and sometimes I grew perplexed beneath their shadows, and fearful of the dangers they suggested. "Why would it be so dreadful if Uncle Llewellyn had come back?" I ask

ed myself over and over again, and could not find any answer; so the question persisted in asking itself in my brain during all the little intervals of occupation or amusement, between play and story and work, after putting down a book, in running up-stairs, whilst waiting about in odd moments. Everywhere I was continually saying to myself after that schoolroom tea,

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Why would it be so dreadful if Uncle Llewellyn had come back?" varied with another form of the question, "Why is it so dreadful that Uncle Llewellyn has come back?"

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"Madeleine!" 'Gladys, how you have startled me! I was fast asleep."

This was one Saturday night, after a week of these questionings. I had gone to bed early, for it had been a dull dripping day. It was summer by this time, and we were having a wet summer after our cold windy spring. The long twilights were dreary I thought that year. Those were the first long days we had passed without Theodora, who never used to lose her delight in long days, or her zest for the twilight hours, even on cold damp summer evenings like these. Wandering about in the gloaming she seemed like some uncanny little sprite at times, calling out to passers-by as she looked out from the granary window when bats were flitting and shadows deepening in the corners between the house and the outbuildings, or bursting into ringing laughter from beneath the weeping elms, or from inside the toolhouse overgrown with creepers, or from any other spidery hidingplace, or flitting round the thick tree-trunks in the shrubbery, glinting here and there at astonishing distances, when even Gladys and I were tired of the day, and feeling

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