Miss Harriet Varian, about these days, was much easier to get along with than in more prosperous ones. Perhaps she was touched by Missy's changed manner and illness; perhaps the insignificance into which they had fallen, had had for her, too, its lesson. And perhaps the spectacle of her sister's faith, had, against her will, shocked her into a study of her own selfish and unlovely life. She had many silent hours now, in which she did not call for Balzac and diversion; she submitted to hear books which she had always refused to listen to. She was less querulous with those around her, less sharp-tongued about her neighbors. She said nothing about St. John and his mother, only listened silently to the news that came of them weekly to Missy. Missy and she understood each other pretty well now; their trouble had drawn them together. In talking, they knew what to avoid, and each considered the other's feelings as never before. Two lonely women in one house, with the same grief to bear, it would have been strange if they had not come together a little, to carry the load. Goneril had so much more to do nowadays, she was much improved. She had had her choice of going away, or staying to do three times the work she had had to do in the other house. It is difficult to say why she stayed, whether from a sort of attachment to Missy, and pity for Miss Varian, or from a dislike of rupture and change. She had had enough of it herself to know real trouble when she saw it, and she certainly saw it in the two women whom she elected to serve. Her wrath had boiled over vehemently at first. She had been anything but respectful to her employer's form of faith. But that was completely settled, once for all, and she now made no allusion to the matter, at least above stairs. It is quite possible that below she may have had her fling, occasionally, at "popish 'pression." The Sister who nursed Missy during her illness, she had, with difficulty, brought herself to be respectful to, but there was so much of the real nurse in the peppery Goneril, that during long watches they had come to be almost friends. The summer passed slowly away; the autumn came, and with it, the flight of the summer birds whose strange gay plumage had made her old home so unnatural to Missy. The dog-carts and the beach-carts and the T-carts had all been trundled away; the boat-houses were locked up, the stables emptied; the six months' leases of the two houses were at an end, and quiet came back to the place.