"He makes no mention of his mother this time," she mused, and her look took a smile that was half a sneer. "Perhaps it vexes him that I should be with one of his friends," was her next thought. "After all, he is Octavia Baynhurst's son, so there must be a good deal of objectionable element in his composition." She made up the fire quietly, and then sat staring into it till a late hour. This letter not only annoyed her, it disquieted her. She realized in this moment that she was changing, that the innumerable new sensations through which she was passing had taken from her altogether that kind of sullenness, that apathy that had fallen upon her like a cloak during her stay with Mrs. Baynhurst. As a school-girl she had been very high-spirited, and even intolerant of restriction; it was wonderful, all things considered, that she had not been called upon to suffer for her strong will, her hot temper, and her defiant spirit. She was very grateful now to the woman who had guarded her and trained her all those years. True, there had been no pretence of affection, softness, or gentle thought, but equally there had been no unnecessary repression, no hardship. Caroline had been allowed freedom up to a certain point; her love of fields, and trees, and flowers, and young animals had never been curbed. In that deserted old school garden (that now gave her a pang to remember) there would be found a plot that had belonged entirely to herself, and where, with seeds and plants begged from the gardener, she had reared to herself a little world of flowers, as dear to her as human beings. The change from this simple and health-giving life, to the unnatural confinement, the irritating atmosphere of Mrs. Baynhurst's house, had worked great ill to Caroline. Unfitted and utterly unprepared to carry out the work Mrs. Baynhurst expected of her, she had shivered like a whipped slave beneath the bitter, biting sarcasm of her employer's tongue; she had been scourged all the time by the sense of her own imperfections; another year of such a life and Caroline would have broken down in mind and body. She was nervous in these days, but only in a purely sympathetic way. The generous affection of these little creatures, who were already as it were dependent on her, brought from the depths of her heart a hot flood of womanly tenderness; awakened with joy the knowledge that it was given to her to be blessed with love, to be permitted to give protective love in return; a wondrously beautiful gift to one who had never known love in any degree! Then, again, contact with Camilla's charming personality was, like her brief intercourse with Mrs. Brenton, an awakening influence. To have been treated as she had been treated by these two women, sympathetically, courteously; to realize that they recognized in her an equal, that friendship with her was not only possible, but desirable, endowed life for her in this moment with an indescribable grace.