“There! you just hush up,” said Margaret.  “I guess you needn’t set up for a lecturer, too; two years younger than I am, you are taking a good deal upon yourself, I should say.  I’m nervous, too.  Young folks are called cross, but older ones always called nervous, when they are cross.  I wish I could go off somewhere.  I’d go anywhere to get away from home, for it’s just dreadful.  Mother don’t care for me one bit.  She don’t scold anybody else as she does me.  When I go over to Mrs. Blynn’s it just makes me sick.  Nettie and her mother are just like two sisters.  They sit under the drop-light with their fancy-work and talk, or Nettie plays her new pieces over for her mother.  I could play as well as Nettie if I had time to practice, but mother don’t seem to care anything at all about my music.  We might keep a girl like other people.  Father is able to.  I think it is too bad.”

“Oh, don’t Mag!  Don’t say any more,” said Florence.  “It makes me shiver to hear you talk so.  You know what it says about honouring parents.  I’m sure something dreadful will happen to you.  You will drop right down dead, maybe, or just think how you would feel if mother should die after you’ve talked so.  Oh, Maggie,” she said timidly, “if you only were a Christian, now, how it would help you.”

“Pho,” said Margaret.  “Mother is a Christian and it don’t help her one bit.”

Then Margaret put her head down on the arm of the lounge and cried.  She had wanted to cry all day, but there was no time.

The door stood partly open between Mrs. Murray’s room and that of her daughters.  That ruined fruitcake had accomplished its work, the severe nervous headache had come and obliged her to go up to her room and lie down, while the girls supposed her to be still in the dining-room; so the talk came floating in to her while she lay on her bed pressing her aching temples.  What a revelation was this!  Was it possible that she was the person meant?  One daughter blaming her, and the other excusing her.  She almost forgot about her head in this new pain.  The first feeling was one of indignation and wounded pride, but conscience told her it was all true, that she was a cross, fretful mother, that she had not made her home a happy one, that she had been selfish and unsympathetic and her children were getting estranged from her.  But the last few words touched her most of all.  “Her religion did not help her.”  Sure enough it did not, any more than a pagan’s, and she had brought dishonour on Christ.  The veil had suddenly fallen from her eyes.  She excused herself from tea on plea of a headache, telling each one who came softly to the door asking to minister to her, that she wanted nothing but quiet.  She wanted to face this dreadful revelation all alone, and yet there came no high resolve that hereafter everything should be different.  She lay there disconsolate, discouraged—­a mere heap, it seemed to herself, weak, purposeless, a soul who had made a failure of life, with no power to alter it.  If she might but slip out of the world entirely; it was all turned to ashes.  How small and mean her ambitions all seemed now.  She had given years of drudgery and this was the result:  made her family miserable.