"It does make you feel good to have anything new," she said, sighing contentedly. "_Anything_, I don't care if it's only a kitchen stove-lifter. But this!--There are an awful lot of things in the world do make you feel good; aren't there, Miss Adams? I mean common things, like putting on dry stockings when your feet are wet, or reading in bed, or sitting in a shady spot on a hot summer's day, with a muslin dress on--yes, or even eating your tea, if you happen to be feeling hungry and have something particularly nice," added this cheerful materialist. The crimson velvet dress was being fitted for the last time when a letter was handed to Mary Ann. Her spectacles were downstairs, so she asked the sewing-girl to read it. "'My dear aunt,'" Miss Adams began, "'Grandma took cold in church a week ago last Sunday and has been laid up----'" There was a quick rustling of the velvet train. Mary Ann was vanishing into the clothes-closet. In a moment she reappeared with a small valise in her hand, and Miss Adams saw in her face what no one had ever seen there before--the shadow of a fear that hovered always on the outer edge of her happy existence and now stood close by her side. Mary Ann might be nine-tenths Maberly, but the other tenth was Colquhoun, after all. "Put a dress into it, please," she said, handing the valise to Miss Adams. "No, I won't wait to take this off--I've a waterproof that will cover it all up. Pin the train up with safety pins--never mind if it does make pin-holes--I've just ten minutes to catch the train. _A week ago Sunday!_ Oh, why didn't they let me know before?" When she alighted from the train at the flag station, she was clutching the waterproof close at the neck. She held it in the same unconscious grasp when she entered Jane's big farm-house, by way of the kitchen. Selina was there, making a linseed poultice, and the odor was mingled with another which she knew afterwards to be the odor of black dye. [Illustration: "_SHE COULD NOT HELP SEEING THAT SELINA FOUND SOME STRANGE PLEASURE IN ALL THESE INCIDENTS OF A LAST ILLNESS_"] In her mother's bedroom the same acid odor was in the air, and Jane was sitting at the window with a piece of black sewing in her hands. Jane's husband and John Maberly were standing at the foot of the bed, silent and melancholy, looking as awkward as men always do in a sick-room; Jane's stern gloom was tinged with a condescending pity for beings so out of place. Mary Ann saw them all at the first glance. Then she forgot everything; she was snuggling down against the bed, making the little, tender, glad, sorry sounds a mother makes when she has been separated from her baby. When she lifted her head the men were leaving the room, John's face working. Selina was there with the poultice. She took it from her. One look into her mother's face had been enough. From that moment she seemed to be holding her back by sheer force of will from the edge over which she was slipping.