’Good morning, Mamsey! why, you’re looking as fresh as a daisy this morning.  You’re getting young again’, said Mr. Dempster, looking up from his newspaper when the little old lady entered.  A very little old lady she was, with a pale, scarcely wrinkled face, hair of that peculiar white which tells that the locks have once been blond, a natty pure white cap on her head, and a white shawl pinned over her shoulders.  You saw at a glance that she had been a mignonne blonde, strangely unlike her tall, ugly, dingy-complexioned son; unlike her daughter-in-law, too, whose large-featured brunette beauty seemed always thrown into higher relief by the white presence of little Mamsey.  The unlikeness between Janet and her mother-in-law went deeper than outline and complexion, and indeed there was little sympathy between them, for old Mrs. Dempster had not yet learned to believe that her son, Robert, would have gone wrong if he had married the right woman—­a meek woman like herself, who would have borne him children, and been a deft, orderly housekeeper.  In spite of Janet’s tenderness and attention to her, she had had little love for her daughter-in-law from the first, and had witnessed the sad growth of home-misery through long years, always with a disposition to lay the blame on the wife rather than on the husband, and to reproach Mrs. Raynor for encouraging her daughter’s faults by a too exclusive sympathy.  But old Mrs. Dempster had that rare gift of silence and passivity which often supplies the absence of mental strength; and, whatever were her thoughts, she said no word to aggravate the domestic discord.  Patient and mute she sat at her knitting through many a scene of quarrel and anguish; resolutely she appeared unconscious of the sounds that reached her ears, and the facts she divined after she had retired to her bed; mutely she witnessed poor Janet’s faults, only registering them as a balance of excuse on the side of her son.  The hard, astute, domineering attorney was still that little old woman’s pet, as he had been when she watched with triumphant pride his first tumbling effort to march alone across the nursery floor.  ‘See what a good son he is to me!’ she often thought.  ‘Never gave me a harsh word.  And so he might have been a good husband.’

O it is piteous—­that sorrow of aged women!  In early youth, perhaps, they said to themselves, ’I shall be happy when I have a husband to love me best of all’; then, when the husband was too careless, ’My child will comfort me’; then, through the mother’s watching and toil, ’My child will repay me all when it grows up.’  And at last, after the long journey of years has been wearily travelled through, the mother’s heart is weighed down by a heavier burthen, and no hope remains but the grave.

But this morning old Mrs. Dempster sat down in her easy-chair without any painful, suppressed remembrance of the pre-ceding night.

‘I declare mammy looks younger than Mrs. Crewe, who is only sixty-five,’ said Janet.  ’Mrs. Crewe will come to see you today, mammy, and tell you all about her troubles with the Bishop and the collation.  She’ll bring her knitting, and you’ll have a regular gossip together.’