She loved Edith all the same--oh, yes! how could she fail to love her only sister, the person most near to her in all the world? But yet she shrank from seeing Edith, and felt at the sound of her happy voice as if she, Carry, must fly and hide herself in some dark and unknown place, and could not bear the contact of the other, who had the best of everything, and in whose path all was bright. To sympathise with one’s neighbour’s blessedness, when all that makes her happy is reversed in one’s own lot, is hard, the hardest of all the exercises of charity. Carry said to herself that she was glad and thankful that all was so well with Edith; but to hide her own face, to turn to the wall, not to be the witness of it, was the best thing to do. To look on at all, with the aching consciousness of failure on her own part, and smile over her own trouble at Edith’s happiness, was more than she was able to do: yet this was what she did day after day. And she read in Edith’s eyes that happy woman’s opinion of Tom, her verdict upon Beaufort, and her disappointment in Janet. Though Edith said nothing, Carry knew all that she could have said, and even heard over intervening miles, and through stone walls, how her sister breathed with a sigh her melancholy name. Poor Carry! Her heart fainted within her to realise everything, yet she did it, and covered her face and covered her ears not to hear and see that pity, which she could neither have heard nor seen by any exercise of ordinary faculties. But the mind by other means both sees and hears. ‘Edward,’ she said to her husband suddenly one day, ‘we must leave this place. I cannot bear it any more!’ He turned round upon her with a look of astonishment. ‘Leave this place! But why, my love?’ he said. His surprise was quite genuine. He had not then, during the whole of her martyrdom, acquired the faintest insight into her mind. ‘There is no reason,’ she said hastily, ‘only that I cannot--I cannot bear it any more.’ ‘But is not that a little unreasonable, Carry? Why should you go away? It is only the middle of September. Tom does not go back to school for ten days at least--and after that----’ ‘Edward, I hate the place. You knew that I hated the place.’ ‘Yes, my love; and felt that it was not quite like my Carry to hate any place, especially the place which must be her son’s home.’ ‘I never wanted to come,’ she said, ‘and now that we have proved--how inexpedient it was----’ ‘Don’t say so, dear. I have told you my opinion already. The best women are unjust to boys in these respects. I don’t blame you. Your point of view is so different. On the contrary, we should have brought Tom here long ago. He ought to have learned as a child that there were men calling themselves his father’s friends who were not fit company for him. I think he has learned that lesson now, and to force him away from a place he is fond of, as if to show him that you could not trust him----’