dissatisfactions.  But she rose superior to them.  When she surveyed her life, and life in general, she would think, with a sort of tart but not sour cheerfulness:  “Well, that is what life is!” Despite her habit of complaining about domestic trifles, she was, in the essence of her character, ’a great body for making the best of things.’  Thus she did not unduly bewail her excursion to the Town Hall to vote, which the sequel had proved to be ludicrously supererogatory.  “How was I to know?” she said.

The one matter in which she had gravely to reproach herself was her indulgent spoiling of Cyril after the death of Samuel Povey.  But the end of her reproaches always was:  “I expect I should do the same again!  And probably it wouldn’t have made any difference if I hadn’t spoiled him!” And she had paid tenfold for the weakness.  She loved Cyril, but she had no illusions about him; she saw both sides of him.  She remembered all the sadness and all the humiliations which he had caused her.  Still, her affection was unimpaired.  A son might be worse than Cyril was; he had admirable qualities.  She did not resent his being away from England while she lay ill.  “If it was serious,” she said, “he would not lose a moment.”  And Lily and Dick were a treasure to her.  In those two she really had been lucky.  She took great pleasure in contemplating the splendour of the gift with which she would mark her appreciation of them at their approaching wedding.  The secret attitude of both of them towards her was one of good-natured condescension, expressed in the tone in which they would say to each other, ‘the old lady.’  Perhaps they would have been startled to know that Constance lovingly looked down on both of them.  She had unbounded admiration for their hearts; but she thought that Dick was a little too brusque, a little too clownish, to be quite a gentleman.  And though Lily was perfectly ladylike, in Constance’s opinion she lacked backbone, or grit, or independence of spirit.  Further, Constance considered that the disparity of age between them was excessive.  It is to be doubted whether, when all was said, Constance had such a very great deal to learn from the self-confident wisdom of these young things.

After a period of self-communion, she would sometimes fall into a shallow delirium.  In all her delirium she was invariably wandering to and fro, lost, in the long underground passage leading from the scullery past the coal-cellar and the cinder-cellar to the backyard.  And she was afraid of the vast-obscure of those regions, as she had been in her infancy.

It was not acute rheumatism, but a supervening pericarditis that in a few days killed her.  She died in the night, alone with the night-nurse.  By a curious chance the Wesleyan minister, hearing that she was seriously ill, had called on the previous day.  She had not asked for him; and this pastoral visit, from a man who had always said that the heavy duties of the circuit rendered pastoral visits almost impossible, made her think.  In the evening she had requested that Fossette should be brought upstairs.