She tried hard, poor little woman, to take a deep and Christian interest in the welfare of her neighbours; but all the while she was conscious of failure. She knew that even at that moment, when she was sitting in her small arm-chair with clasped, guilty hands, her whole heart and soul were absorbed beyond retrieval in a small bundle of white flannel and pink humanity in a cradle upstairs. The Rector had dropped his weekly review upon his knees and was staring at her angrily. “I really can't tell,” he continued, “what you can have been thinking about to let such a ridiculous thing come to pass. What are you thinking about now?” “Well, dear,” confessed the little woman shamedly, “I was thinking of Baby--of Dora.” “Thought so,” he snapped, with a little laugh, returning to his paper with a keen interest. But he did not seem to be following the printed lines. “I suppose she was all right when you were up just now!” he said carelessly after a moment, and without lowering his paper. “Yes, dear,” the lady replied. “She was asleep.” And this young mother of forty smiled softly to herself as if at some recollection. This happiness had come late, as happiness must for us to value it fully, and Mrs. Glynde's somewhat old-fashioned Christianity was of that school which seeks to depreciate by hook or by crook the enjoyment of those sparse goods that the gods send us. The stone in her path at this time was an exaggerated sense of her own unworthiness--a matter which she might safely have left to another and wiser judgment. Presently the Rector laid aside the newspaper, and rose slowly from his chair. “Are you going upstairs, dear?” inquired his tactless spouse. “Um--er. Yes! I am just going up to get--a pocket-handkerchief.” Mrs. Glynde said nothing; but as she knew the creak of every board in the room overhead she became aware shortly afterwards that the Rector had either diverged slightly from the path of which he was the ordained finger-post, or that he had suddenly taken to keeping his pocket-handkerchiefs in the far corner of the room where the cradle stood. It will be readily understood that in a household ruled, as this rectory was, by a sleepy little morsel of humanity, Anna Hethbridge was in no way hindered in the furtherance of her own personal purposes--one might almost add periodical purposes, for she never held to one for long. The Squire was very lonely. His boy Jem, aged four, would certainly be the happier for a mother's care. Above all, Miss Hethbridge seemed to want the marriage, and so it came about. If Anna Hethbridge had been asked at that time why she wanted it, she would probably have told an untruth. She was rather given, by the way, to telling untruths. Had she, in fact, given a reason at all, she would perforce have left the straight path, because she had no reason in her mind.