“Do so,” replied Aunt Maria.  “Indeed, it has been a very fatiguing day for you, and for us all.  Go, and I will tell Arnold you are dressing.  It only wants half an hour to dinner.”

“I will be ready.”

And so she was.  But for twenty of the thirty minutes she had lain motionless on her bed, almost like a dead figure, as passive and as white.  Then she rose, dressed herself, and went down to the formal meal, and to the somber, safe routine of her present existence, as it would flow on—­and she prayed with all her heart it might—­until she died.

Chapter 5.

    "He stands a-sudden at the door,
     And no one hears his soundless tread,
     And no one sees his veiled head,
     Or silent hand, put forth so sure,

    "To grasp and snatch from mortal sight;
     Or else benignly turn away,
     And let us live our little day,
     And tremble back into the light:

    "But though thus awful to our eyes,
     He is an angel in disguise."

Every human being, and certainly every woman, has, among the various ideals of happiness, good to make, if never to enjoy, one special ideal—–­that great necessity of every tender heart—–­Home.

Christian had made hers, built her castle in Spain, and furnished and adorned it from basement to battlement, even when she was a girl of fourteen.  Sitting night after night alone, listening for the father’s footstep, and then trembling when she heard it, or hidden away up in her own bedroom, her sole refuge from the orgies that took place below, where the sound of music, exquisite music, went up like the cry of an angel imprisoned in a den of brutes, the girl had imagined it all.  And through every vicissitude, hidden closer for its utter contrast to all the associations and experience of her daily life, Christian Oakley had kept in her heart its innocent, womanly ideal of home.

Now, she had the reality.  And what was it?

Externally it looked very bright.  Peeping into that warm, crimson-tinted dining-room at the hour between dinner and tea, when the whole family at the lodge were sure to be assembled there, any body would say what a happy family it was, and what a pleasant picture it made.  Father and mother at either end of the table; children on both sides of it; and the two elderly aunts seated comfortably in their two arm-chairs at the fireside, one knitting—­q. e. d.—­, sleeping, the other—­

No.  Miss Gascoigne never slept.  Her sharp,

    "Flaw-seeking eyes, like needles’ points,"

were always open, and more especially when the circle consisted, as now, of her brother-in-law, his children, and his new wife.  Doubtless she considered watchfulness her duty.  Indeed, as she explained over and over again to Aunt Maria, the principal reason which made her consent still to remain at the Lodge, instead of returning to her own pretty cottage at Avonside, was to overlook and guard the interests of “those poor motherless children.”