"For I shall never dare take the pendant to show to anybody again," she thought, with a shudder. "The next person I went to might send for the police then and there. And perhaps it was horrible of me to think of pawning mother's pendant at all--only--I don't believe she would have minded, if she had known how dreadfully, dreadfully poor her little girl was going to be--and how hard it is for a girl even to get bread enough to keep from starvation. And I know this is worth--oh! a lot of money," she exclaimed pathetically, once more taking the ornament from its box, and holding it before her in the light of the lamp. As the green gleam of the stones flashed out before her eyes, the dreary room in which she sat, her squalid surroundings, even her own misery faded from her mind; she was back in the past--back in her mother's bedroom in the dear Devonshire home--her mother's dying voice sounding in her ears. Through the open window had drifted the song of the sea, mingling with the hum of bees amongst the roses that climbed to the very sill, and made the room fragrant with their sweetness. And a bird had sung--ah! how it had sung, on that last night of her mother's life, when Christina felt that her life too was going down into the dark for ever. "My little girl"--how faint the gentle voice had been!--"I--can't stay--now father has gone; he--and I--could not ever be apart. He is my world---all my world." The dim resentment which Christina, the child, had sometimes experienced, because those two beings she loved best had seemed so remote from her, so perfectly able to live their lives without her, had smitten the girl Christina afresh as she listened to her mother's words. Her father and mother had been so wrapped up in one another, always so wholly sufficient for each other's needs, that their child had played a very secondary part in their lives. And the child had dimly resented it. Through all the sorrow that filled her heart as she stood beside her mother's deathbed, that smouldering resentment would not be wholly stilled. Her mother could barely spare a thought for the girl she was leaving to face the world alone, because her husband filled her whole soul; she could remember only that he had gone before her into the silent land, and that she must hasten to join him again. "You are so young," the dying voice had murmured on, whilst the fast dimming eyes looked, not at her little daughter, but at the blue sky outside the window, "somebody will want you some day--as--Ronald--wanted me--as--he wants me still." Christina did not answer, only her eyes followed her mother's glance out to the deep blue sky framed by the nodding roses round the window; and she wondered dully whether anybody would really care for her some day, or whether there was something inherently unlovable in her, seeing that her own father and mother had seemed to find her so little worthy of love.