“Good gracious, Sophia! it’s only the hen with one chicken that’s afraid to take another under her wing.”

“I know you want to do your best for her—­that’s why I’m talking.”

“Oh, I—­it’s you that takes half the burden of them all.”

“Well, we want to do our best—­”

“And you, my dear, could go back whenever you liked. You have not burned the bridges and boats behind you.  There’s one would be glad to see you back in the old country, and that lover of yours is a good man, Sophia.”

A sudden flush swept over the young woman’s face, as if the allusion offended her; but she took no other notice of what was said, and continued:  “I don’t suggest any radical alteration in our ways; I only thought that, if you had it in your mind to make a companion of her, the pains you take in teaching her might take a rather different form, and perhaps have a better result.”

“I think our own girls grow more giddy every day,” said Mrs. Rexford, exactly as if it were an answer.  “If Blue and Red were separated they would both be more sensible.”

The mother’s mind had now wandered from thought of the alien she had taken, not because she had not given attention to the words of the daughter she thought so wise, but because, having considered them as long as she was accustomed to consider anything, she had decided to act upon them, and so could dismiss the subject with a good conscience.

The conversation ceased thus, as many conversations do, without apparent conclusion; for Sophia, vexed by her step-mother’s flighty manner of speech, hid her mood in silence.  Anything like discussion between these two always irritated Sophia, and then, conscious that she had in this fallen below her ideal, she chafed again at her own irritation.  The evil from which she now suffered was of the stuff of which much of the pain of life is made—­a flimsy stuff that vanishes before the investigation of reason more surely than the stuff of our evanescent joys.  There was nothing that could be called incompatibility of temper between these two; no one saw more clearly than Sophia the generosity and courage of Mrs. Rexford’s heart; no one else sympathised so deeply with her motherly cares, for no one else understood them half so well; and yet it might have been easier for Sophia Rexford to have lived in external peace with a covetous woman, able to appreciate and keep in steady view the relative importance of her ideas.

Meantime Mrs. Rexford went on talking.  She was generally unconscious of the other’s intellectual disdain.  Pretty soon they heard bells and horses’ feet that slackened at the gate.  Sophia stood up to look.