There was no one to tell her aunt what new, strange instincts and aspirations were struggling to the light in Molly.  A passionate pity for pain would seize on her and hold her in a grip until she had done some definite act to relieve it.  But pity was either not akin to love in Molly, or her affections had been too starved to take root after the immediate impulse of mercy was passed.  The girl was not popular in the village, although, unlike Mrs. Carteret, her poorer neighbours had a great idea of Molly’s cleverness.  Needless to say that when, after some unmeasured effort at relieving suffering, Molly would come home with a sense of joy she rarely knew after any other act, it hurt her to the quick and roused her deepest anger to find herself treated like a naughty, inconsiderate child.  The storms between Mrs. Carteret and Molly were increasing in number and intensity, with outspoken wrath on one side, and a white heat of dumb, indignant resistance on the other.  Then, happily, there came a change.  Molly’s education had been of the very slightest until she was nearly sixteen, when Mrs. Carteret told her to expect the arrival of a finishing governess.  She also announced that a music master from the cathedral town would, in future, come over twice a week to give her lessons.

“It’s not my doing,” said Mrs. Carteret,—­and meaning only to be candid she sounded very ungracious; and although she did not pay for these things, it was due to her urgent representations of their need that they had been provided.  Molly supposed that all such financial arrangements were made for her by her father’s lawyer, of whom she had heard Mrs. Carteret speak.

Throughout these years it had never occurred to Mrs. Carteret to doubt that Molly believed her mother to be dead, and she never for a moment supposed the child’s silence on the subject to be ominous.  Such silence did not show any special power of reserve; many children brought up like Molly will carefully conceal knowledge which they believe that those in authority over them suppose them not to possess.  Perhaps in Molly’s case there was an instinctive shrinking from exposing an ideal to scorn.  Perhaps there was a wholly unconscious want of faith in the ideal itself, an ideal which had been built up upon one phrase.  Yet the notion of the beautiful, exiled mother, so cruelly concealed from her child, was very precious, however insecurely founded.  It must be concealed from other eyes by mists of incense, and honoured in the silence of the sanctuary.

The new governess, Miss Carew, was a very fair teacher, and she soon recognised the quality of her pupil’s mind.  Mrs. Carteret was possibly a little disappointed on finding that Miss Carew considered Molly to be very clever, as well as very ignorant.  The widow was herself accustomed to feel superior to her own circle in literary attainments,—­a sensation which she justified by an occasional reading of French memoirs and by always getting through at least two