Milly was barely nineteen when this happened; but even then her mother--who had always been ailing--was threatened with a chronic complaint involving no ordinary suffering; and now began the long seven years' watching which faded Milly's youth and roses together. Milly had never known how galling had been the strain to the nerves--how intense her own tenacity of will and purpose, till she had folded her mother's pale hands together; and with a lassitude too great for tears, felt as she crept away that her work was finished none too soon, and that even her firm young strength was deserting her. Trouble had not come singly to Mildred. News of her sister-in-law's unexpected death had reached her, just before her mother's last brief attack, and her brother had been too much stunned by his own loss to come to her in her loneliness. Not that Milly wondered at this. She loved Arnold dearly; but he was so much older, and they had grown necessarily so apart. He and his wife had been all in all to each other; and the family in the vicarage had seemed so perfected and completed that the little petted Milly of old days might well plead that she was all but forgotten. But Betha's death had altered this; and Arnold's letter, written as good men will write when their heart is well-nigh broken, came to Mildred as she sat alone in her black dress in her desolate home. New work--unknown work--and that when youth's elasticity seemed gone, and spirits broken or at least dangerously quieted by the morbid atmosphere of sickness and hypochondria. They say the prisoner of twenty years will weep at leaving his cell. The tears that Mildred shed that night were more for the mother she had lost and the old safe life of the past, than pity for the widowed brother and motherless children. Do we ever outlive our selfishness? Do we ever cease to be fearful for ourselves? And yet Mildred was weary of solitude. Arnold was her own, her only brother; and Aunt Milly--well, perhaps it might be pleasant. 'Say yes, Milly--for Betha's sake--for my darling's sake (she was so fond of you), if not for mine. Think how her children miss her! Matters are going wrong already. It is not their fault, poor things; but I am so helpless to decide. I used to leave everything to her, and we are all so utterly lost. 'I could not have asked you if our mother had lingered; but your faithful charge, my poor Milly, is over--your martyrdom, as Betha called it. She was so bright, and loved to have things so bright round her, that your imprisonment in the sickroom quite oppressed her. It was "poor Milly," "our dear good Milly," to the last. I wish her girls were more like her; but she only laughed at their odd ways, and told me I should live to be proud of them.