"I don't feel as if I could remember about it," said Amethyst, with a sudden impulse, the change in her face showing that she was still child enough to be touched by the first kind word. "No, my dear, but don't you think it would be good for you to recall it?" "I can't be good, I wasn't made to be," said Amethyst, in a tone which she thought was wickedly defiant, but which really showed confidence in her listener's comprehension. "No, my dear," said the Rector again; "very few of us are. But we are all made to be a little better by effort, and prayer." "I am _worse_," said Amethyst, tears filling her eyes, while her whole figure trembled. "Yes, no doubt; but I think you will find it possible to make each day a little better. And I have always found it worth while, Amethyst. It makes all the difference in the long run between one man and another. I am sure there is a better and a worse before you in life, my dear, even if you think there is not a very good." Perhaps this was the consolation of age rather than of youth. But it came to Amethyst as a truth. It might not be worth while to be a little less self-absorbed, a little less wretched; but she knew that it was possible. "God bless you, my dear child, and good-bye," said Mr Riddell, "you shall come or not to the Rectory to-morrow, as you like." Miss Riddell went away with only a kind smile and hand-shake, and Amethyst, left alone, burst into a rain of tears. The kindness, the sense of trust in the speakers had been like her native tongue in a foreign land. It was natural; while her own people were strange. She remembered the kind of girl she used to be, as if her girlhood were twenty years away; bliss and misery had alike blotted it out. But the habits and the instincts of her whole training were not utterly killed; the sense of duty began to lift its head. It was better to be kind to Una, and to show her that there was "a better" in life, than to acquiesce in her despair. It was better to read history, and to practise or to walk with the girls, than to sit alone and brood over her injuries, or to read, in the novels left about by her mother, of far worse injuries leading to worse despair, to learn from these books to what her infant passions were akin, and to bite deeper into the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge--of herself. Of course, she did not put it so. "It was better not to feel like those wicked people, at least not to think of feeling like them." And slowly and dully she turned her steps homewards through the wood; a bad way to come, since she and Lucian had loved it together. Oh, what was _he_ doing? Did he feel as if life was done? Perhaps the most agonising moment she had known, was when the conviction came to her that it was not in him to feel as she did. "If I had thought that he had gambled or betted, or been wicked, I would have held on tighter, to help him to be good. But he gave up _me_!"