Meanwhile, Rebecca, with hard conscientiousness, set herself to bring the child up. She trained her, and disciplined her, and made a painful point of talking to her about the first Mrs. Gray, according to her promise to teach her to "love and reverence her mother." The discipline sometimes made Robert Gray wince; but it was wise, and never unkind; so he never interfered;--but he left the room when it was going on. Once he said, nervously: "I scarcely think, Mrs. Gray, that it is necessary to be quite so severe?" "She must be made a good child," Rebecca answered. "I am not afraid that she will not be a good child," Robert Gray said; "she is her mother's daughter." "Well, she is her father's daughter, too," Rebecca declared, briefly. And her husband, shrinking, said: "Light is stronger than darkness; Alice's mother was a creature of light. I am not afraid of her inheritance of darkness." As for Rebecca, she went away and shut herself up in the garret. "'Creature of light!'" she said, sitting on the floor under the rafters, and leaning her head on an old horsehair-covered trunk wherein were packed away Mr. Gray's winter flannels--"well, I am a good wife to him, if I ain't a 'creature of light.'" Yes, she was a good wife.... How carefully she put his flannels away in May; how prudently she planned his food; how she managed to make the two ends of his little income meet--yes, and lap over, so that every summer he could go away from her for a two months' vacation in the woods! Not once did he find a button lacking; not once had he put on a clean pair of stockings and then pulled them off because of a hole in the heel. Can our lords say as much, my mistresses? I trow not! Yes, a good wife: that lovely being who left the world with a faint, unfinished regret upon her pitiful lips could never have made him so comfortable. Indeed, the whole household revolved upon Robert's comfort. Every domestic arrangement had reference to his well-being. That he did not become intolerably selfish was not Rebecca's fault, for, like many good wives, she was absolutely without conscience in the matter of self-sacrifice; but Robert escaped spiritual corruption, thanks to his own very gentle nature and his absolute unconsciousness of the situation. Perhaps, too, Rebecca's tongue mitigated the spoiling process. She never spared him what she considered to be the truth about himself or Alice. But her truthfulness stopped here; she spared the dead, perforce. For what could she say ill of that beautiful creature whose only wrong-doing lay in dying? But she knew, with shame, that she would have liked to speak ill of her--in which reprehensible impulse to remove a fellow-being from a pedestal, Rebecca showed herself singularly like the rest of us.