The Rev. John uttered a smothered cry, and without a word to his guest hurried from the room. Miles followed him. But Nora remained quietly by the window and took no notice of the squire as, with an awkwardly expressed hope that "it would be all right," he left her to herself. She knew what had happened. Her mother had bidden her good night, and night had come. She was alone—in the whole world alone and friendless. *CHAPTER II* *EXILED* There is only one sorrow in life which is really great, and that is the loss of those we love. The other sorrows seem great so long as we have been spared the hardest blow which life can deal us, and then we understand that, after all, they were very petty and that if we had chosen we could have borne them patiently, even cheerfully. Loss of health, loss of wealth, loss of position—they are all bad in their way, and as a rule we make the worst we can of them; but not till we have to bear them _alone_, without the support of some familiar, loving hand, have we the right to cry out that we can endure no more. And for the first time in her life Nora knew loneliness—not the loneliness which she had felt in her husband’s home and amongst her husband’s people, for that had been temporary, a state which could, if necessary, be overcome by a return to those whom she had left of her own free-will and whose love and sympathy she could still claim. _This_ loneliness was final, unbridgeable. Death had raised up a wall between her and all return. The one being whose hand could have comforted her, in whose arms she could have found peace and rest, had passed beyond recall, and it was in vain that, in a childish agony of grief, she flung herself down by her mother’s sofa and pleaded with the dead not to leave her comfortless. There was no answer. The patient, noble woman who had lain there day after day without complaint, watching the slow, painful fulfilment of her destiny, had gone and would come no more. She had gained her freedom. Even in her own stormy sorrow Nora realised so much—that her mother was free and that her life had been a long, bitter imprisonment, to which it would have been cruel to recall her. She had gone willingly, passing out of a sphere in which she had always been an exile, and taking with her the last—perhaps the only link which had ever bound Nora to her home. In those hours when Nora had hated the stuffy little flat and had longed for the scent of the home flowers, it had always been of her mother’s garden which she had thought; when she had seen the picture of the Vicarage rise before her eyes it had always been her mother’s room which had stood out clearest, which had tempted her by the tenderest recollections. And now that her mother had gone, that home had ceased to be her home. The flowers were dead in the garden, the rooms empty of the old haunting charm, the glamour which her exile’s