It was Lady Mary who had come into the vicarage that afternoon when Mrs. Bowyer supposed some one had called.  She wandered about to a great many places in these days, but always returned to the scenes in which her life had been passed, and where alone her work could be done, if it could be done at all.  She came in and listened while the tale of her own carelessness and heedlessness was told, and stood by while her favorite was taken to another woman’s bosom for comfort, and heard everything and saw everything.  She was used to it by this time; but to be nothing is hard, even when you are accustomed to it; and though she knew that they would not hear her, what could she do but cry out to them as she stood there unregarded?  “Oh, have pity upon me!” Lady Mary said; and the pang in her heart was so great that the very atmosphere was stirred, and the air could scarcely contain her and the passion of her endeavor to make herself known, but thrilled like a harp-string to her cry.  Mrs. Bowyer heard the jar and tingle in the inanimate world, but she thought only that it was some charitable visitor who had come in, and gone softly away again at the sound of tears.

And if Lady Mary could not make herself known to the poor cottagers who had loved her, or to the women who wept for her loss while they blamed her, how was she to reveal herself and her secret to the men who, if they had seen her, would have thought her an hallucination?  Yes, she tried all, and even went a long journey over land and sea to visit the earl, who was her heir, and awake in him an interest in her child.  And she lingered about all these people in the silence of the night, and tried to move them in dreams, since she could not move them waking.  It is more easy for one who is no more of this world, to be seen and heard in sleep; for then those who are still in the flesh stand on the borders of the unseen, and see and hear things which, waking, they do not understand.  But, alas! when they woke, this poor wanderer discovered that her friends remembered no more what she had said to them in their dreams.

Presently, however, when she found Mary established in her old home, in her old room, there came to her a new hope.  For there is nothing in the world so hard to believe, or to be convinced of, as that no effort, no device, will ever make you known and visible to those you love.  Lady Mary being little altered in her character, though so much in her being, still believed that if she could but find the way, in a moment,—­in the twinkling of an eye, all would be revealed and understood.  She went to Mary’s room with this new hope strong in her heart.  When they were alone together in that nest of comfort which she had herself made beautiful for her child,—­two hearts so full of thought for each other,—­what was there in earthly bonds which could prevent them from meeting?  She went into the silent room, which was so familiar and dear, and waited like a mother long separated from