Anne felt, when the interview was over, that she had in all probability done more harm than good. She had frightened Keziah, and made her cling all the more to the comfort which sprang from a settled resolution, and she had even stimulated that resolve by the prick of opposition which moves the meekest of natures. She had made Keziah feel herself wronged, her sacrifice unappreciated, her duty misconceived, and the girl had fallen back with all the more confidence on the approval of her (as Anne thought) worldly-minded aunt, and the consolation of the old bridegroom, who, though he was old, was a great man in the servants’ hall--great as the butler and head of the establishment downstairs, and still more great as the prospective landlord of the ‘Black Bull’ at Hunston. To be the future mistress of such a place was a glory enough to turn a girl’s head. Keziah went away crying, and feeling that she had not deserved the cruel ‘scolding’ administered by Miss Anne. She going to the bad! when she was doing her duty in the highest and most superlative way, and had hanging over her head, almost touching it, the crown of that landlady’s cap, with the most becoming ribbons, which ranks like the strawberry leaves of another elevation in the housekeeper’s room and the servants’ hall. It was the morning after this that Cosmo arrived. Anne was going downstairs to a morning’s work with Mr. Loseby, thoughtful and serious as she always was now; but by this time all the strangeness of her position was over; she had got used to it and even reconciled to it. She had work to do, and a position in the world which was all that one wanted for happiness. Indeed, she was better off, she said to herself, than if she had been in her natural position. In that case, in all probability, she would have had someone else to do for her what she was now to do for Rose, and her occupation would have been gone. She felt that she had passed into the second chapter of life--as if she had married, she said to herself with a passing blush--though so different. She had real work to do in the world, not make-believe, but actual--not a thing she could throw aside if she pleased, or was doing only for amusement. Perhaps it requires a whole life of leisure, and ideas shaped by that exemption from care which so often strikes the generous mind as ignoble, which made her appreciate so highly this fine burden of real unmistakable work, not done to occupy her time merely, but because it had to be done. She prepared herself for it, not only without pain but with actual pleasure. But on her way down to the library, where Mr. Loseby was waiting her, Anne chanced to cast her eyes out from the end of the corridor across the park. It was the same window to which she had rushed to listen to the cry the night her father died. It had been night then, with a white haze of misty moonlight and great shadows of blackness. But now it was morning, and the red sunshine lighted up the