That winter Miss Barhyte was more circumspect. It was not that her affection had faltered, but in the monochromes of a great city the primal glamour that was born of the fields and of the sea lost its lustre. Then, too, Lenox in the correctness of evening dress was not the same adorer who had lounged in flannels at her side, and the change from the open country to the boarding-house parlor affected their spirits unconsciously. And so the months wore away. There were dinners and routs which the young people attended in common, there were long walks on avenues unfrequented by fashion, and there were evenings prearranged which they passed together and during which the girl’s mother sat up stairs and thought her own thoughts. Mrs. Barhyte had been a pretty woman and inconsequential, as pretty woman are apt to be. Her girlhood had been of the happiest, without a noteworthy grief. She married one whose perfection had seemed to her impeccable, and then suddenly without a monition the tide of disaster set in. After the birth of a second child, Maida, her husband began to drink, and drank, after each debauch with a face paler than before, until disgrace came and with it a plunge into the North River. Her elder child, a son, on whom she placed her remaining hopes, had barely skirted manhood before he was taken from her to die of small-pox in a hospital. Then came a depreciation in the securities which she held and in its train the small miseries of the shabby genteel. Finally, the few annual thousands that were left to her seemed to evaporate, and as she sat in her room alone her thoughts were bitter. The pretty inconsequential girl had developed into a woman, hardened yet unresigned. At forty-five her hair was white, her face was colorless as her widow’s cap, her heart was dead. On the night when her daughter, under the chaperonage of Mrs. Hildred, one of her few surviving relatives--returned from the reception, she was still sitting up. At Mrs. Hildred’s suggestion a position, to which allusion has been made, had been offered to her daughter, and that position--the bringing up or rather the bringing out of a child of the West--she determined that her daughter should accept. Afterwards--well, perhaps for Maida there were other things in store, as for herself she expected little. She would betake herself to some Connecticut village and there wait for death. When her daughter entered the room she was sitting in the erect impassibility of a statue. Her eyes indeed were restless, but her face was dumb, and in the presence of that silent desolation, the girl’s tender heart was touched. “Mother!” she exclaimed, “why did you wait up for me?” And she found a seat on the sofa near her mother and took her hand caressingly in her own. “Why are you up so late,” she continued, “are you not tired? Oh, mother,” the girl cried, impetuously, “if you only knew what happened to-night--what do you suppose?”