But the next minute Miss Balquidder had turned round, and risen, smiling.

“Miss Leaf, how very kind of you to come and see me!  Just the day before the wedding, too, when you must be so busy!  Sit down and tell me all about it.  But first, my dear, how wet your boots are!  Let me take them off at once.”

Which she did, sending for her own big slippers, and putting them on the tiny feet with her own hands.

Hilary submitted—­in truth she was too much surprised to resist.

Miss Balquidder had, like most folk, her opinions or “crotchets”—­as they might be—­and one of them was, to keep her business and friendly relations entirely distinct and apart.  Whenever she went to Kensington or her other establishments she was always emphatically “the mistress”—­a kindly and even motherly mistress, certainly, but still authoritative, decided.  Moreover, it was her invariable rule to treat all her employees alike—­“making no step-bairns” among them.  Thus for some time it had happened that Hilary had been, and felt herself to be, just Miss Leaf, the book keeper, doing her duty to Miss Balquidder, her employer, and neither expecting nor attaining any closer relation.

But in her own house, or it might be from the sudden apparition of that young face at her lonely fireside, Miss Balquidder appeared quite different.

A small thing touches a heart that is sore with trouble.  When the good woman rose up—­after patting the little feet, and approving loudly of the woolen stockings—­she saw that Hilary’s whole face was quivering with the effort to keep back her tears.

There are some woman of whom one feels by instinct that they were, as Miss Balquidder had once jokingly said of herself, specially meant to be mothers.  And though, in its strange providence, Heaven often denies the maternity, it can not and does not mean to shut up the well-spring of that maternal passion—­truly a passion to such women as these, almost as strong as the passion of love—­but lets the stream, which might otherwise have blessed one child or one family, flow out wide and far, blessing wherever it goes.

In a tone that somehow touched every fibre of Hilary’s heart, Miss Balquidder said, placing her on a low chair beside her own.

“My dear, you are in trouble.  I saw it a week or two ago, but did not like to speak.  Couldn’t you say it out, and let me help you?  You need not be afraid.  I never tell any thing, and every body tells every thing to me.”

That was true.  Added to this said mother-liness of hers, Miss Balquidder, possessed that faculty, which some people have in a remarkable degree, and some—­very good people too—­are totally deficient in, of attracting confidence.  The secrets she had been trusted with, the romances she had been mixed up in, the Quixotic acts she had been called upon to perform during her long life, would have made a novel—­or several novels—­such as no novelist could dare to write, for the public would condemn them as impossible and unnatural.  But all this experience—­though happily it could never be put into a book—­had given to the woman herself a view of human nature at once so large, lenient, and just, that she was the best person possible to hear the strange and pitiful story of young Ascott Leaf.