“Frances, I'll tell you something I once saw and can never forget. When I slept in mother's room, I woke one night, and found she had risen. She opened a drawer that was always kept locked, and took out a likeness of father. After looking at it again and again--can you believe that?--she laid it on a chair, and, kneeling down, prayed to God for us all, and that they might meet again; and then she looked at him once more, and put the picture in its place. “Pray God, Frances, that you and I, who are to be married on Tuesday, may love as she has done, once for ever; do you know I've often thought that Grace is the only one of us that has mother's power of affection, and yet we are to be married and she is to be left.” “Yes, Grace is like mother, and yet I don't think mother understands her one bit What a wife she would make to some man, Gerty; only it would be bad for him. She would serve him like a slave, and he would be insufferable. “But there is no fear of that calamity,” Frances went on, “for Grace will never marry. She is beginning to have the airs of an old maid already, a way of dressing and a certain primness which is alarming.” “It passes me,” said Gertrude, “how no man has seen her excellence and tried to win her; do you know I've sometimes thought that Mr. Lennox admired her; they would certainly make a perfect pair.” “You are the dearest old stupid, Gertrude. Of course George Lennox adores Grace, as he would do a saint in a painted window; and Grace appreciates him because he teaches astronomy or conchology or something to working men in the East End. Neither of them knows how to make love; their conversation is a sort of religious exercise,” and Frances' eyes danced with the delight of a mistress in her art “Why, I once did my best with him just to keep my hand in, and Gertrude, you might as well have flirted with that wretched god. I would rather have the god, for he winked to me just now quite distinctly, the reprobate old scoundrel.” “Perhaps you're right, and Grace does not wish to marry. But it will be lonely in this big, empty house for mother and her when we are gone.” “Dull! Gerty, you do not understand the situation. It will be a relief for the two of them to have this love traffic over, and no more men about the house. Grace simply endures it, as a nun might, and the mater resents any of her daughters being married. They have their programme fixed. Grace will visit her sick people in the forenoon, and the mater will do her tradesmen; in the afternoon the two will attend the Committee for the Relief of Decayed Washerwomen, and after dinner Gracie will read to mother out of Hallam's _Middle Ages_. “I'll box that creature's ears,” and Frances jumped to her feet, a very winsome young woman indeed; “he's grinning from ear to ear on his pedestal at some wicked joke, or as if he knew a family secret He's an old cynic, and regards us as a pair of children prattling about life.” II