her.  Why should she lose everything?  What had she done?  She reviewed her past life, and she defended herself like Job, with her summary of self-righteousness.  She had always done right, so far as she knew.  Her sins had been so petty as hardly to deserve the name of sins.  She remembered how she had once enjoyed seeing her face in her looking-glass, how she had liked pretty, new dresses, and she could not make that seem very culpable.  She remembered how, although she had never loved her step-mother, she had observed, except on that one occasion when Evelyn was lost, the utmost respect and deference for her—­how she had been, after the first, even willing to love her had she met with the slightest encouragement.  She could not honestly blame herself for her carefully concealed attitude of disapproval towards Ida, for she said to herself, with a subtlety which was strange for a girl so young, that she had merited it, that she was a cold, hard, self-centred woman, not deserving love, and that she had in reality been injurious for her father.  She was convinced that, had her own mother lived, with her half-censorious yet wholly loving care for him, he might still have preserved his youth and his handsome boyishness and health.  She thought of the half-absurd, half-tragic secret which underlay her life, and she could not honestly think herself very much to blame for that.  She always thought of that with bewilderment, as one might think of some dimly remembered vagary of delirium.  Sometimes it seemed to her now that it could not be true.  Maria realized that she was full of self-righteousness, but she was also honest.  She saw no need for her to blame herself for faults which she had not committed.  She thought of the doctrine which she had heard, that children were wholly evil from their birth, and it did not seem to her true.  She could say that she had been wholly evil from her birth, but she felt that she should, if she did say so, tell a lie to God and herself.  She honestly could not see why, for any fault of hers, her father should die.  Then suddenly her mind gave a leap from her own standing-point to that of her father.  She suddenly reflected that it was not wholly her own grief for his loss which was to be considered, but her father’s grief at quitting the world wherein he had dwelt so long, and his old loves of life.  She reflected upon his possible fear of the Unknown into which he was to go.  There was in Maria’s love for her father, as there had been in her mother’s, a strong element of the maternal.  She thought of her father with infinite pity, as one might think of a little child about to go on a long, strange journey to an unknown place, all alone by himself.  It seemed to her an awful thing for God to ask one like her father to die a lingering death, to realize it all fully, what he had to do, then to go off by himself, alone.  She remembered what she had heard from the pulpit on Sundays, but somehow that Unknown seemed so frightfully wide and