THE BEST OF FATHERS

1

Mrs. Holmroyd had not lived all her life in Daneborough. Only the briefest, saddest and most tragic part of it. Nor had she, prior to this time of sorrow, made and sold pork pies. They were a part of her tragedy.

Less than an interminable year before, this ancient town of Daneborough had, to her, been but a name. Then one day, weighted by the weeds that proclaimed her recent sorrow, she had come to the town with her two children, leaving behind the best of husbands and of fathers in the crowded church-yard of the cruel city that had killed him.

The city was no crueller than other thriving cities are. And it had not killed him. But a fine grief does not stand abjectly on fact. It demands a spacious inconsistency to move in. To reduce the death of one so dearly loved to a natural process of imperfect nature seems like a denial of nobility; an utter dereliction of the duties of love. Mrs. Holmroyd’s love transfigured her dead husband as a martyr whom, for his very virtues, a cruel city slew. He had died defending her and his, his last hours embittered only by anxious love for them.

The truth is, they had probably loved each other over well, these two. Their lives had been too deeply interwoven; each grown too dependent on the love and loyalty of the other. Marriages less ideal than theirs have this advantage at least: they offer a better preparation for widowhood. Union may be strength, but it is at the cost of the individual, and to those who have once known the blessed liberty of bondage independence is a cribbed and cruel thing. Her husband’s memory had been burden enough to bear, without those deeper obligations weighting it. For though Oswald Holmroyd discharged in full his debt to Nature, Nature was not, alas, the only creditor demanding satisfaction.

Death, even the most exemplary, is no solatium to a man’s creditors. Rather does it seem a source of fury and annoyance to them that debtors should have liberty to die at all. The race of creditors is bigoted and ruthless. It recognizes but one virtue in the world: the virtue that is solvent. For a man to die without the least hatred of those to whom he owes money, for him to forgive all his enemies, to take the tenderest leave of wife and family, and steal unobtrusively away by life’s back door whilst his creditors keep watch upon the front--is to them naught. Man’s first duty to his fellow-men (they say) is to succeed. Those who hold such exalted views of life as to be above making money by methods disagreeable to their own pride, should be above owing it. Fine feelings, lofty principles, elevated ideals--these things are well enough for those who can afford them, but they have got to be paid for as surely as suites of furniture and Persian rugs.

They were right. Oswald Holmroyd admitted they were right. In the weeks before he died, no creditor could have passed more scathing judgment on his conduct than himself. He acquired almost a creditor’s clairvoyance for seeing facts, who had till then seemed blind to everything but absurd ideals. What justification, indeed, is to be found for an architect who looks only at the sublimities of his calling, and who maintains the stubbornest resistance to adulterate its standard with the mercantile dilutions of the age?

What justification is to be found for an architect who will not cry his abilities abroad nor hook fingers through the button-holes of mammon, nor conciliate councillors nor flatter aldermen nor hob-nob with the jerrybuilder. He had had a business and he had lost it, chiefly because of inability to reconcile his theories with life. He saw how success was to be won, and shirked it, always hoping that the principles he held by would prevail. More than once, in the bitterness of failure, he told his wife: “The time is gone by for architects. Houses are turned out by machinery, nowadays. There is no work for me.... I ought to have been a butcher.”

The cry was but another plea for his incompetence. He would have succeeded no better as a butcher, no better as a baker, no better as anything at all in this degenerate world that refused to sink to the world’s own level in order to draw inglorious profit from it. For there were architects--architects on every hand around him--who did succeed. Though, as he asked himself at times with the bitterness that disappointment breeds even in the gentlest of us: “But _how_!”

How? Ah well! Certainly not by leaving their abilities to a busy age to discover for itself. Not by drawing elevations of imaginary cathedrals during idle hours, or working out competitive designs for workhouses and public buildings, to be implicitly submitted in accordance with the published terms.

Perhaps marriage--such a perfect marriage as his had been--did not evoke the best in him. This atmosphere of love and sympathy might be too enervating for a man temperamentally tender. A wife of sterner mould was what he needed; a home less dear to him than the one he had. And perhaps, too, their dispositions--his and hers--were too unfortunately akin. His faults were her faults; his failings her failings; her sympathies and weaknesses his. She was too prone to take his side, to justify in him what prudence had done wiser to condemn. She half suspected it, indeed. The dead weight of a too-loving wife (she dared to hint) had handicapped him. For her and for his children’s sake he had essayed to do too much, to furnish them with comforts and a home beyond his means. They should retrench; give up this house that had been so dear to both, sink their pride; face life afresh on a lower level and with humbler eyes. The fateful topic, long imprisoned in their anxious looks, was forced to their lips at last. For the first time in his wife’s knowledge Oswald Holmroyd buried his head in his hands with a dreadful gesture of despair and told her: “God forgive me Margaret. We can’t go on like this. I am a failure. Help me to face it.”

Who could have helped him better? Here was the true wife for the hour of trouble; the help meet for man. If she had once doubted him as he begged to be doubted he might (who knows) have suffered his defeat more easily. But she never doubted; she never accused. The faith that she had in him cut deeper than reproaches. It was the world’s fault (she said) not his. But the time would come (she pledged her word) ... the time was coming.

All too true. The time was coming indeed, more quickly than either of them knew. It was not the first time that Death had rapped at the door of Oswald Holmroyd’s life, and to that earlier summons charity might attribute not unjustly all those latter misfortunes that the architect charged against his own disposition, for he never regained ground after that first illness. Neither of them had been forgetful of the dreadful promissory note impending. But they had tried, both, to believe the bill of infinite renewal. And because it was not pressed upon their notice with the regularity of those other and earthly bills they dared to think at last their creditor indulgent or the liability annulled. Death is such an unmethodical creditor, to be sure, who, presenting his account for instant settlement and terrifying the wretched client almost to the point of payment, will waive the claim for years. But this time the debtor entertained no doubt that the debt was to be collected. Death’s call, at such a moment,--disclosing a visage not much darker than life’s own--might be considered even opportune; a refuge from his own reproaches and an escape from all enemies. Death, in this selfish guise, revolted him. “I feel such a coward,” he told his wife, “to leave you at a time like this.”

For her this speech, monstrously distorted through the tears with which she looked back on it, presented always the blurred gigantic outlines of an epic. Here was death rapping at the door; beneath, at the street corner and all around, those other creditors planned and whispered. And she, defending the stricken man, strove with all the love within her to overcome his adversaries--even death--and free the citadel from its investment. She failed, of course. Death is no respecter of love, courage or womankind. And creditors are creditors. However much the gravity of Oswald Holmroyd’s condition might be concealed from friends--always scrupulous respecters of a trouble likely to make demands on them--from these it could not be hid. From lip to lip the rumour spread. Specialists had been consulted. Oswald Holmroyd’s state of health was critical for all parties concerned. Another creditor was in the field. A meeting without delay must be arranged. Some settlement must be arrived at.

The meeting was arranged, that took place (out of regard for his condition) in the dying man’s dining-room, where wrapped in his dressing-gown with a shawl round his shoulders and propped in an arm chair the dying man awaited it. Never would his widow forget that assemblage of dark-faced men that gathered about the house in twos and threes, short of the appointed hour, and made one ringing of the bell admit them all. She watched them from the curtained fastness of her bedroom window, with a rage at heart. Love is so illogical, so partizan, that it never once occurred to her to consider these as fellow creatures animated (conceivably) by a love not less intense or illogical than her own, which led them here in pursuit of their rights for the defence of homes as dear to them as this to her that their entry threatened.

When the last of them had been admitted, and the preliminary coughs and shuffling of feet had sunk into a silence that seemed to suffocate the very heart of the house, she stole downstairs and took her station by the door,--to bear her share of suffering with Him; to clasp her hands and watch and guard. At first the voices, subdued with consciousness of the disadvantage under which they laboured in presence of one so obviously stricken, rose no higher than a murmur. But after awhile, when the spectacle of the sick man had lost its first impressive novelty, and a sufficient consideration seemed (for all practical purposes) to have been paid him, a warmer current crept into the tones of speech. Here and there voices rose abruptly above the level of other voices, as if impatient of the arbitrary limits within which their common grievance was confined. One such voice--a soulless, toneless, grudging, disputative voice, surmounted the murmur from time to time as if actuated by intent to pitch the proper note of acrimony for the meeting. Its mere inflection, aiming to accuse the sick man in his chair, smote her solicitude across the lips, and made her draw sharp breath with a gasp of pain. More than once, agitated by a surging impulse to rescue her loved one from his martyrdom, she threw out her hand towards the door. She heard the tired accents of her husband’s voice, and the accents of this other voice that negatived or scorned it, and mingled voices contending among themselves, and the sound of hortatory knuckles rapped upon the table. And regardless of the promise given to her husband, her outraged love could no longer be denied. Without reason, without warning, driven solely by the power of her woman’s impulse, she turned the handle of the door and made herself an active partner in his shame.

Her entrance, during one short moment, struck all this animation to stone. She had a perception--too instantaneously vivid, like the lightning flash, for her startled senses to register--of faces curiously turned, of figures seated and statuesquely standing, of arms extended, of a table littered with hands and papers, of a meeting transfixed in the supreme instant of intensity. At that, the force which had impelled her thus far failed. Her eyes sought and fastened on the figure of her husband, whose lips shaped her name reproachfully: “Margaret!” From him she turned her gaze again upon his persecutors.

“Please.... O! please,” she begged with a voice of shocked entreaty. “My husband is....” “Dying,” truth might have added. “Dying” was the dreadful word she stopped at, the word her helpless eyes confessed to them. “My husband is ... seriously ill” she said instead. And obeying the dictate of a sudden tenderness that burned almost to ferocity in its desire to share his martyrdom, and prove to these hard faced men her husband’s worth, she passed all swiftly to his side, drew his head into the protection of her arms, and kissed him.

2

More dreadful than his death were the mocking obsequies and bitter days that followed. While that serene countenance still shone from its pillow her security seemed unassailed. Here, with her beloved dead in the pure atmosphere of perfect sorrow, she felt raised above all reach or soil of earth. From the world’s petty frets and cares; from ignoble griefs and mean anxieties, she arose in company with the dead to this impenetrable halting place betwixt the grave and heaven. For three days, undying, she knew death; tasted its sweetness and tranquillity.

All this the funeral destroyed, rending pious illusion with the rough hand of reality. The body, so passionately guarded, must be given up at last; this fine sorrow must suffer admixture with coarse and worldly impurities; with the muffled tramp of undertakers’ men; with the creaking hearse, the oscillating coaches; the long, interminable progress through Clothton’s busy streets--brimming with laughter and animation, prying curiosity or stolid disregard--into the dismal area slowly reached, whose heart was a minute-beating bell; where, beneath the inken tower of a sooty church, amid a congregation of soot-blackened tombstones, his last home yawned for Oswald Holmroyd at the foot of an untidy mound of yellow clay.

To the mercies of this sacred place, wrapped in the mantle woven from the belchings of a thousand chimneys, heart-rent and reluctant she left her dead. Reality, doffing his specious habiliments of woe as utterly as the sexton did, stood in readiness to remind her of her obligations to an altered world. The mourning coach, rolling on its too responsive springs, cast aside all pretence of consideration for wounded feelings. Freed from the obstruction of a hearse it bowled homeward with the gay inconsequence of a hackney cab. The uplifted blinds admitted a profane and staring light into the so-recent sanctuary of sorrow, and revealed its soulless void. Voices, that had for these three bygone days been murmurous, mere attenuated shadows of themselves, became voices once again, impinging too hard upon the flinching ear of trouble. Everything that had made death bearable, or sorrow sacred, Reality removed. These were mere drapery for the dead (Reality reminded her). To-day there was no dead to be considered. No corpse availed her now. She was alone. Hard facts, not sacred visions, confronted her.

She was Oswald Holmroyd’s widow, and the lesson of his death was wasted on her, for she was very proud. Pride had been in large degree the secret of her husband’s unsuccess. Pride had killed him. The pride that reposes too confidently on its virtue like a strong man on his strength; that thinks sheer merit should succeed; that will not use its elbows to assist ability, or push when pushed in turn. Out of stern duty to the insolvent dead must she be doubly independent now. She asked no aid of charity. Her children were her own children. She should delegate to none their care and love. Such independence was very reassuring to relatives and friends, whom it enabled to take credit for an aid rejected, and to retire with the most praiseworthy forebodings, submitting to a woman’s foolish obstinacy that nothing short of the gentlest persuasion could have overcome. Nor did her independence stop short of taking charity alone. It went to lengths that caused her late husband’s lawyers to shake their heads and show a very laudable concern for this misguided creature whose quixotic duty sought to rise superior to the law. The law had been framed, they wisely pointed out, for just such contingencies as hers. Oswald Holmroyd’s creditors would benefit under the law to the precise extent that the law allowed them,--which (though they could not yet commit themselves to say for certain) might conceivably amount to ten shillings or twelve and sixpence in the pound. Since her late husband’s creditors were prepared to take advantage of the legal position so far as it affected them, surely it was for her to do no less.

But pride would not listen to such advocacy. Her senseless loyalty to the dead insisted on making his debts, like his faults and weaknesses, her own. The memory of that dreadful toneless voice, monotonizing its reproaches in the dead man’s dining-room, stung self-respect to madness. Those dwindling hundreds of surviving pounds--the last remnants of her own small fortune, too sadly drawn upon in recent months--must lend their aid to free the dead man’s name from the least whisper of insinuation. She would take shelter behind none of the law’s invidious distinctions. Into their lives no division had ever entered. He and she had been but one. Their joys, their sorrows, hopes and fears and consolations--all were shared. His defamation was her shame. She would not hide behind a debt-dishonoured grave. To the last pound they should be paid, some day, these dues, if God but gave her life and strength.

And so her pride prevailed, and the thin lips of the law, that a satiric faint smile frosted at the edges, deferred to this perverse acceptance of needless obligations, saying: “If she wished it so, Mrs. Holmroyd.” And she wished it so. And it was so.

And when the last dread formalities of death and debit had been confronted, Oswald Holmroyd’s widow took her two children by the hand and turned her back on all that earth held dearest to her.

The act seemed like desertion of the dead. But there was no alternative. A hundred reasons rent her heart and strengthened her resolve. The very friends that might have helped necessity offered a stumbling block to pride. So long as she remained in Clothton would she perpetuate a living memorial to his failure. It could not be. Her pride and love were all in conflict; each cancelling the other. She must go where humility might be free. Where love might sink upon its knees, if need were, on any service consecrate to him.

3

Through every act of woman’s life there flows a hidden stream of instinct whose winding course the footsteps of her conduct follow. Her acknowledged reasons are but the straws that float upon it, marking a current beyond their guidance or control; a current that gives direction to her logic, and force to her convictions, flowing uninterrupted from the primal source of her sex.

So, the reasons that led Mrs. Holmroyd to Daneborough were, in man’s conception of the term, no reasons. For she knew little of this quiet market town beyond its name. But the name attracted her. Once, indeed, in his latter moments of despondency her husband had inclined to utter it, saying that this place (perhaps; who knows ...) might have served them better than grimy Clothton. Other reasons too there were, all of them drawing hallowed authority from death. An old, well-trusted servant in her mother’s days had come from Daneborough, or near it, returning ultimately to her native place to die. Now, by that communicable grief that holds out hands to every other grief, and kindles tapers of affection above remote and long forgotten graves, the feeble glimmer from this distant tomb assumed a brightness almost stellar in its comfort. Those lips unsealed from their long slumber spoke again to Mrs. Holmroyd as they had familiarly spoken in earlier days. Led by such unexceptional woman’s reasons, therefore, she brought her family to Daneborough.

At first she took refuge in apartments, till sorrow should be weaned; till it should be made conversant with its altered whereabouts, and learn the character and lineaments of the strange place from which its living must henceforth be won. These rooms were in the Horse Green--which is the open space abhorrent to maternity when Daneborough’s horse fairs are being held, and quadrupeds with malice in their rolling eyeballs and puffed nostrils, and murder in their iron heels, thunder riotously up and down like hurricanes on four legs, attached to pigmy grooms by precarious headropes, threatening the brains of infancy. For anybody but Sorrow, with two small children to support, these rooms--albeit small--might have been comfortable enough, for only infrequent passers-by darkened their flat windows, and across the open square in front of them stood but the rampart of a stone-coped wall between the eyes of sorrow and the vista of illimitable green it sighed for.

But for sorrow these rooms were cramped and hateful. Clean, after their manner, they might be. Nevertheless, to sensitive nostrils they exhaled the alien odours of the lodging house: an odour of necessitous stuffs and hard-used furniture divested of all individuality by years of loveless service, hinting too dreadfully at her own future still unperceived and feared. Worst of all--though she knew this not till later--these rooms were graduates in sorrow like herself. They knew what it meant to have lost a good husband. Why, to be sure, the very best; whose virtues had been imposed on, and whose life had been laid low by qualities which, out of a native gentleness of soul (it seemed) he had lacked the necessary firmness to subdue. He had been too good to people; he had studied them too much, and himself too little. These rooms understood what it was to leave a good home. They had felt the same as Mrs. Holmroyd when fate summoned them to surrender their lovely large kitchen and two gas stoves and come here. They understood only too well what it meant to come down in the world. If their husband had only listened to the advice they gave him they might have been driving their pony trap to-day, for it was a good House they had to leave, possessed of an old established custom, with an off license and an excellent back door.

One might have thought that sorrow, companioned by a sorrow so identical and sisterly, should have found a well of healing in this providential place. But no. As though sickened with the proffer of a sustenance too familiar, her soul revolted. Sorrow possesses a religion of its own. That her dead husband should be reduced to partake of God’s hospitality in company with a promiscuous gathering of eleventh-hour repentants, affronted her faith. Surely there must be differentiations even in the guest house of God.

At base, perhaps, the matter was no more than the competitive jealousy of widowhood in regard to the respective excellencies of dead husbands; one of whom advocated the champion claims by assertion, the other by a shocked and shrinking reticence. But here, at least, she could no longer stay. The licensed victualler committed to the cemetery more than twenty years before she rose up to make this transitory home untenable for a husband so beloved as hers.

And then, too, she suffered a soul’s hunger for some place particular to her own loves and hopes and doubts and sorrows, that she might consecrate with the hallowed name of home. Can it be conceived in these enlightened days, when woman has been educated to consider Home as part of her martyrdom--can it be conceived with what passionate longing the mother of Oswald fought to gain freedom from the odious bondage of publicity, even in so pedestrian a place as Daneborough, and gather round herself and children once again the pure untroubled ether of a home?

By such emotions animated at last she came to choose the house in Springbank Gardens that we have already seen by night. Not that Daneborough was for ever wrapped in mist or municipal fog. By day the Gardens--that at an earlier age were said to have been beautiful enough, but that the incursions of successive hordes of builders had driven into servitude behind brick walls,--shewed a not uncheerful face to the enquiring sun. Where Mrs. Holmroyd dwelt the houses were of three storeys, single-fronted. Higher up the street they dispensed with a story, and the bay window of the front room receded into a flat and inconspicuous sash. In one of these latter, by rights, she should have been. These were the houses (her prudence told her) meet for sorrow such as hers. But still the influence of early training clung about her, and impeded her actions like a wet skirt. Pride was yet recalcitrant. It stooped a little to necessity, but would not kneel. Those womanly and worthless reasons, thronged with memory and surgent with emotion, rushed up to oppose reality. A dreadful optimism persisted through all she did. She must not choose a house too modest or too small. The handicap of such a dwelling-place might prove too heavy for her children. At all costs she must strive to keep before their eyes the memory and standard of that better, lovelier life from which (but for a while) they were exiled; of that best of fathers lost to them.

So the house in Springbank Gardens was chosen with the energy of fear, lest the precarious white paper, pressed like a wan forehead against the uncurtained window-pane, might vanish ghostly on a sudden and leave them homeless yet again. Out of the cherished wreckage of the old home was this new home made; from the familiar furniture of her girlhood’s days, pensioned by love when Oswald Holmroyd offered her his heart. The Piano on which she had practised so many wretched, happy hours as a girl. The cradle of mahogany in which her mother and her mother’s mother had rocked in infancy, and she in turn; and both her children after her. The old bureau belonging to her grandfather, and those Victorian ornaments devoid of any value outside the market of affection that had been relegated to a pious limbo at Clothton and were now restored, with tears of reconciliatory joy, to the intimate bosom of the new life.

True, in the first revulsive throes of pride she had talked of sacrificing even these, averring she would take nothing from a home which was in substance hers no longer. But after the first paroxysm of her pride more temperate counsels had prevailed. The law, if occasionally it oppress, does sometimes succour. And if the legal confidant of her dead husband charged--as to the last unwavering six and eightpence he ultimately did--for such service as legal skill could render to Oswald Holmroyd’s widow, it was to him at least she owed the restoration of this precious furniture. For he had said: “I think you are making a great mistake, Mrs. Holmroyd. Why should you sacrifice your own property of such trifling financial consequence to the estate, and of such sentimental value to yourself, when there is no need to do so?”

The presence of these familiar and treasured things--as we may be sure so astute and versed a lawyer must in his legal wisdom have foreseen--helped to fortify his client; to make the strange walls beneath their strange crude wallpapers bearable. At least, life was not altogether broken; not altogether severed from the sacred past. These old things reconciled her to the new. In course of time they would transmit their quality to the unfamiliar features of the house and permeate all its spaces with the spirit of intimacy and love.

4

The new home at length completed, she turned her energies towards the new life. It dismayed her.

For she had believed, when she broke free of Clothton, her chiefest difficulty was escaped. She had believed that Clothton’s bricks and mortar and busy streets, its friends and memories and deterrent prides were the true realities contesting purpose. Coming to Daneborough, her love--it seemed to her, for those dear sakes involved--was capable of any sacrifice, was capable of doing anything. But now she was here; now she had made remote acquaintance with the human elements to be encountered: the eyes to be endured, the lips to suffer, the suspicions to wince under--she realized what philosophers of the practical school have long ago acknowledged: that Anything is Nothing. In the struggle for a livelihood gentlefolk with fine feelings suffer a heavy handicap against ungentle folk without. The willing doer of Anything is at a discount, pushed aside by the hardened specialists in Something whom no shame deters. And doubly does afflicted widowhood stand at a disadvantage before the world. Widows with encumbrance, in reduced circumstances, are notoriously to be apprehended, as all well-wishers will allow. Especially in the first year of their widowhood does it behove the cautious to beware. They darken the doorway; they suffocate a room; the odour of their weeds is left behind them when they go, a depressing atmosphere of tears and sooty crape and deathbeds.

O, she was aware, this widow, in what small repute her state was held. She had herself--now God forgive her--in better days lent doubtful ear to pleas of suppliant widowhood, divided betwixt pity and suspicion. To-day she was become the thing she judged. Distressed gentility, offering vague service, inspired not confidence but doubt. She must pursue a firmer course than that; take up a bolder attitude. The inspiration followed on resolve. She would inaugurate a school.

Yes. A school. Not a pretentious school, straining the sinews of her purse and knowledge. A small and manageable school at first, till learning found its feet. Here was an enterprise not unbecoming in a lady, susceptible, even, of a certain dignity. Her very widowhood, indeed,--although she shrank from putting so exalted an estate to profit--should be of value to her here, affording anxious parenthood a surety of her seriousness in the supervision of youth.

Trepid, and with an anxious heart, she set about her task. To some, such labour had been light enough; to her, it cannot be described how onerous it was. In one regard, indeed, it was a sort of death she underwent, that all her vital processes resisted. Before she could be reborn to the new life she must first die to the old. She died at last, expiring on a selected doorstep, before the eyes of her two children.

Painters, poets, philosophers and theologians of all ages have depicted death with the gusto for a topic to their liking. Generations of writers, being happily at the time alive, have described the experience of dissolution with such circumstance and detail as would convince the dead, were the dead only open to conviction. The majority of these have agreed to make Death terrible. In this, perhaps, they follow a wise instinct, for if Death be not terrible, what is he? A mere ethical nonentity, indeed, to be scorned by adults and flouted by children. There is, to be sure, an increasing company of writers who, for some reason, conspire to regard Death as a sort of super-sentimental tax collector, who comes with soft music, wreathed in persuasive smiles as beautiful as seven and sixpenny chaplets, to collect the earthly imposts due to heaven. He is conceived so gentle that little children, unafraid, take him by the hand. Old people, at the sound of his footsteps, sit up eagerly in bed to greet him. Let these two schools dispute among themselves. If Mrs. Holmroyd’s experience is anything for living people to go by, then is Death indeed a most prodigious thing. She surged up to the house door on a tidal wave of blood, that seemed for the moment as if it had force enough to flood her to the very gates of heaven. Then, as her fingers sought and found the bell, the tide relapsed and left her impotent and stranded, the victim of a violent tinnitus as if a hundred sanctus bells were ringing in her brain. The world about her reeled and swam. This was death at last. No mere matter of wills and won’ts, of likings or dislikes, but the inexorable Must that puts courage and cowardice on one common footing. The door of the new world burst open. The old life was dead. Her children, watching hand in hand, saw their mother engulfed in this strange house, withdrawn from sight as utterly as if the Lord had sent a flaming chariot drawn by fiery horses down from heaven to fetch her.

Yet such is the innocence of youth, and so little effect have the most prodigious happenings on the untutored mind, that they saw nothing untoward in their mother’s disappearance. She had merely paid a call and been admitted by a fresh-cheeked maid in streamers.

5

After this she died many times. She died daily. That there might be no doubt about her death, no way left open for withdrawal, she took official leave of life in the columns of the Daneborough Mercury, under the heading EDUCATION. Thus:--

LADY. (Widow) patient and conscientious. Fond of children and teaching. Seeks limited number of scholars to educate in small home school along with own children. (Boy and Girl.) Every care and attention. Thorough religious instruction. For terms etc. Apply Box