pitied her, had done their part.  The angels who watch over prayer and effort and failure; and failure and effort and prayer, had laid their hands upon her brow, bestowing graces.  As she sat now, speaking out of a full heart, there came a colour and light that gave an ethereal charm to her handsome face.  There was no one there to see it; Eliza Cameron was not susceptible to beauty.  God, who created beauty in flowers and women, and knew to the full the uses thereof, did not set flowers in gardeners’ shows nor women in ball-rooms.

Sophia had spoken strongly, vividly, of the vanity of what men call success, and the emptiness of what they call wealth, but Eliza, self-centred, did not enter into this wide theme.

“You despise me,” she repeated sullenly, “because of what I have done.”

“What makes you think I despise you?”

She did not intend to draw a confession on the false supposition that Bates had already told all the story, but this was the result.  Eliza, with arms folded defiantly, stated such details of her conduct as she supposed, would render her repulsive, stated them badly, and evoked that feeling of repulsion that she was defying.

Sophia was too much roused to need time for thought.  “I cannot condemn you, for I have done as bad a thing as you have done, and for the same reason,” she cried.

Eliza looked at her, and faltered in her self-righteousness.  “I don’t believe it,” she said rudely.  She fell back a pace or two, and took to sorting the piles of white coverlets mechanically.

“You did what you did because of everything in the world that you wanted that you thought you could get that way; and, for the same reason, I once agreed to marry a man I didn’t like.  If you come to think of it, that was as horrid and unnatural; it is a worse thing to desecrate the life of a living man than the death of a dead one.  I stand condemned as much as you, Eliza; but don’t you go on now to add to one unnatural deed another as bad.”

“Why did you do it?” asked Eliza, drawn, wondering, from the thought of herself.

“I thought I could not bear poverty and the crowd of children at home, and that fortune and rank would give me all I wanted; and the reason I didn’t go through with it was that through his generosity I tasted all the advantages in gifts and social distinction before the wedding day, and I found it wasn’t worth what I was giving for it, just as you will find some day that all you can gain in the way you are going now is not worth the disagreeableness, let alone the wrong, of the wrong-doing.”

“You think that because you are high-minded,” said Eliza, beginning again in a nervous way to sort the linen.

“So are you, Eliza.”  Miss Rexford wondered whether she was true or false in saying it, whether it was the merest flattery to gain an end or the generous conviction of her heart.  She did not know.  The most noble truths that we utter often seem to us doubtfully true.