“I have no wish to laugh, Sophy, I assure you. If your aunt or some one wakes and finds you gone from your bed, how shall you explain it?” “Oh, I shall tell her that I was-- I know what I shall tell her,” Sophy said, recovering herself; “I am not such a silly as that.” “You are not silly at all, my dear. I wish you were not half so clever,” said John. He turned away with a sick heart. Sophy and those unconscious, terrible revelations of hers were more than the man could bear. The air was fresh outside, the day was young; he seemed to have come out of an oppressive atmosphere of age and sophistication, calculating prudence and artificial life, when he left the child behind him. He was so much overwhelmed by Sophy that for the moment, he did not fully realize the importance of what she had told him, and it was not till he had walked some distance, and reconciled himself to nature in the still brightness of the morning, that he awoke with a sudden sensation which thrilled through and through him to the meaning of what the little girl had said. Her mother--was it possible? no ghost, but a living woman. This was indeed a solution of the problem which he had never thought of. At first, after Madam’s sudden departure from Highcourt, John Trevanion went nowhere without a sort of vague expectation of meeting her suddenly, in some quite inappropriate place--on a railway, in a hotel. But now, after years had passed, he had no longer that expectation. The world is so small, as it is the common vulgarity of the moment to say, but nevertheless the world is large enough to permit people who have lost each other in life to drift apart, never to meet, to wander about almost within sight of each other, yet never cross each other’s paths. He had not thought of that--he could scarcely give any faith to it now. It seemed too natural, too probable to have happened. And yet it was not either natural or probable that Mrs. Trevanion, such as he had known her, a woman so self-restrained, so long experienced in the act of subduing her own impulses, should risk the health of her children and shatter their nerves by secret visits that looked like those of a supernatural being. It was impossible to him to think this of her. She who had not hesitated to sacrifice herself entirely to their interests once, would she be so forgetful now? And yet, a mother hungering for the sight of her children’s faces, severed from them, without hope, was she to be judged by ordinary rules? Was there any expedient which she might not be pardoned for taking--any effort which she might not make to see them once more?