Cynthia was very beautiful, and was so well aware of this fact that she had forgotten to care about it; no one with such loveliness ever appeared so little conscious of it.  Molly would watch her perpetually as she moved about the room, with the free stately step of some wild animal of the forest—­moving almost, as it were, to the continual sound of music.  Her dress, too, though now to our ideas it would be considered ugly and disfiguring, was suited to her complexion and figure, and the fashion of it subdued within due bounds by her exquisite taste.  It was inexpensive enough, and the changes in it were but few.  Mrs. Gibson professed herself shocked to find that Cynthia had but four gowns, when she might have stocked herself so well, and brought over so many useful French patterns, if she had but patiently awaited her mother’s answer to the letter which she had sent announcing her return by the opportunity madame had found for her.  Molly was hurt for Cynthia at all these speeches; she thought they implied that the pleasure which her mother felt in seeing her a fortnight sooner after her two years’ absence was inferior to that which she would have received from a bundle of silver-paper patterns.  But Cynthia took no apparent notice of the frequent recurrence of these small complaints.  Indeed, she received much of what her mother said with a kind of complete indifference, that made Mrs. Gibson hold her rather in awe; and she was much more communicative to Molly than to her own child.  With regard to dress, however, Cynthia soon showed that she was her mother’s own daughter in the manner in which she could use her deft and nimble fingers.  She was a capital workwoman; and, unlike Molly, who excelled in plain sewing, but had no notion of dressmaking or millinery, she could repeat the fashions she had only seen in passing along the streets of Boulogne, with one or two pretty rapid movements of her hands, as she turned and twisted the ribbons and gauze her mother furnished her with.  So she refurbished Mrs. Gibson’s wardrobe; doing it all in a sort of contemptuous manner, the source of which Molly could not quite make out.

Day after day the course of these small frivolities was broken in upon by the news Mr. Gibson brought of Mrs. Hamley’s nearer approach to death.  Molly—­very often sitting by Cynthia, and surrounded by ribbon, and wire, and net—­heard the bulletins like the toll of a funeral bell at a marriage feast.  Her father sympathized with her.  It was the loss of a dear friend to him too; but he was so accustomed to death, that it seemed to him but as it was, the natural end of all things human.  To Molly, the death of some one she had known so well and loved so much, was a sad and gloomy phenomenon.  She loathed the small vanities with which she was surrounded, and would wander out into the frosty garden, and pace the walk, which was both sheltered and concealed by evergreens.

At length—­and yet it was not so long, not a fortnight since Molly had left the Hall—­the end came.  Mrs. Hamley had sunk out of life as gradually as she had sunk out of consciousness and her place in this world.  The quiet waves closed over her, and her place knew her no more.