Mrs. Lord grew paler, put her hand to her heart, wavered, caught herself, wavered again, and fell into the great chair by the window.  Her eyes closed, and Olive, frightened by the apparent effect of her words, ran down the back stairs and summoned the cook.  When she returned, panting and breathless, her mother was sitting quite quietly by the window, looking out at the cedars.

“It was only a sudden pain, dear!  I am all well again.  Nothing is really the matter, Bridget.  Mr. Lord will not be down to supper; spread a tray for him, please.”

“I’d like to spread a tray for him at the bottom of the Red Sea; that’s where he belongs!” muttered Bridget, as she descended to the kitchen to comfort Cyril.

“Was it my fault, mother?” asked Olive, bending over her anxiously.

Her mother drew the child’s head down and leaned her own against it feebly.  “No, dear,” she sighed.  “It’s nobody’s fault, unless it’s mine!”

“Is the pain gone?”

“Quite gone, dear.”

Nevertheless the pain was to prove the final wrench to a heart that had been on the verge of breaking for many a year, and it was not long before Olive and Cyril were motherless.

Mr. Lord did not have the slightest objection to the growing intimacy between his children and the new family in the Yellow House, so long as he was not disturbed by it, and so long as it cost him nothing.  They had strict orders not to play with certain of their village acquaintances, Mr. Lord believing himself to be an aristocrat; the fact being that he was almost destitute of human sympathy, and to make a neighbor of him you would have had to begin with his grandfather and work for three generations.  He had seen Nancy and Gilbert at the gates of his place, and he had passed Mrs. Carey in one of his infrequent walks to the post-office.  She was not a person to pass without mental comment, and Mr. Lord instantly felt himself in the presence of an equal, an unusual fact in his experience; he would not have known a superior if he had met one ever so often!

“A very fine, unusual woman,” he thought.  “She accounts for that handsome, manly boy.  I wish he could knock some spirit into Cyril!”

The process of “knocking spirit” into a boy would seem to be inconsistent with educational logic, but by very different methods, Gilbert had certainly given Cyril a trifling belief in himself, and Mother Carey was gradually winning him to some sort of self-expression by the warmth of her frequent welcomes and the delightful faculty she possessed of making him feel at ease.

“Come, come!” said the petrels to the molly-mocks in “Water Babies.”  “This young gentleman is going to Shiny Wall.  He is a plucky one to have gone so far.  Give the little chap a cast over the ice-pack for Mother Carey’s sake.”