Was there harm in it? she asked herself, aghast. Altogether the day was not a pleasant one for Mrs. Meredith. It seemed to plunge her back into those agitations of youth from which surely middle age ought to deliver a woman. It wronged her in her own eyes, making even her generous temper a shame to her. Had she been too good: as he said--too kind? an accusation which is hurtful, and means something like insult to a woman, though to no other creature. Too kind! No expression of contempt, no insinuated slander can be more stinging than this imputation of having been too kind. Had she been too kind to her sorrowful neighbour? had she led him to believe that her kindness was something more than kindness? She, whose special distinction it was to be kind, whose daily court was established on no other foundation, whose kindness was the breath of her nostrils; was this quality, of which she had come to be modestly conscious, and of which, perhaps, she was a little proud, to be the instrument of her humiliation? She was not a happy wife, nor indeed a wife at all, except in distant and not very pleasant recollection, and in the fact that she had a watchful husband, at the end of the world, keeping guard over her. Was it possible that she had given occasion for his interference, laid herself open to his scorn? It seemed to the poor woman as if heaven and earth had leagued against her. Too kind; suspected by the jealous man who watched her, despised by the ungrateful man by whom her tender generosity had been misinterpreted! She sent down a message to Cara that she was not going out. She sent word to her visitors that she had a headache. She saw nobody all day long. Too kind! The accusation stung in the tenderest point, and was more than she could bear. CHAPTER XXV. AN IDEALIST.