hard, and occasionally bitter in his speeches and ways.  Molly now learnt to long after the vanished blindness in which her father had passed the first year of his marriage; yet there were no outrageous infractions of domestic peace.  Some people might say that Mr. Gibson ‘accepted the inevitable;’ he told himself in more homely phrase ‘that it was no use crying over spilt milk;’ and he, from principle, avoided all actual dissensions with his wife, preferring to cut short a discussion by a sarcasm, or by leaving the room.  Moreover, Mrs Gibson had a very tolerable temper of her own, and her cat-like nature purred and delighted in smooth ways, and pleasant quietness.  She had no great facility for understanding sarcasm; it is true it disturbed her, but as she was not quick at deciphering any depth of meaning, and felt it to be unpleasant to think about it, she forgot it as soon as possible.  Yet she saw she was often in some kind of disfavour with her husband, and it made her uneasy.  She resembled Cynthia in this; she liked to be liked; and she wanted to regain the esteem which she did not perceive she had lost for ever.  Molly sometimes took her stepmother’s part in secret; she felt as if she herself could never have borne her father’s hard speeches so patiently:  they would have cut her to the heart, and she must either have demanded an explanation, and probed the sore to the bottom, or sate down despairing and miserable.  Instead of which Mrs. Gibson, after her husband had left the room on these occasions, would say in a manner more bewildered than hurt,—­

’I think dear papa seems a little put out to-day; we must see that he has a dinner that he likes when he comes home.  I have often perceived that everything depends on making a man comfortable in his own house.’

And thus she went on, groping about to find the means of reinstating herself in his good graces—­really trying, according to her lights, till Molly was often compelled to pity her in spite of herself, and although she saw that her stepmother was the cause of her father’s increased astringency of disposition.  For indeed he had got into that kind of exaggerated susceptibility with regard to his wife’s faults, which may be best typified by the state of bodily irritation that is produced by the constant recurrence of any particular noise:  those who are brought within hearing of it, are apt to be always on the watch for the repetition, if they are once made to notice it, and are in an irritable state of nerves.

So that poor Molly had not passed a cheerful winter, independently of any private sorrows that she might have in her own heart.  She did not look well, either; she was gradually falling into low health, rather than bad health.  Her heart beat more feebly and slower; the vivifying stimulant of hope—­even unacknowledged hope—­was gone out of her life.  It seemed as if there was not, and never could be in this world, any help for the dumb discordancy