With unloving eyes I watched my mother lift an ugly black spider very gently in a handkerchief, and put the creature out to safety. But that haggard hop-picker--no, I couldn't understand it. The hop-picker haunted me. Then I made a compact with her. For her sake I would contrive, somehow, to give bread to any hungry man or woman who should go by. "And so," I addressed the hop-picker in my thoughts, "though you had no bread for yourself, you will be the means of giving bread to others." The hop-picker accepted the arrangement. Peace came back. In the vague pagan fashion of the young I thought, too, that by kind deeds I might pay off my mother's score. Her fears for us somehow prevented her from feeling for other people's children. Something I didn't know about had made her like that. In my struggle to resolve the discord between a nagging conscience, and my adoration for my mother, I seemed to leave childhood behind. Still, very dimly, if at all, could I have realised there was any connection between her continued shrinking from our fellow-creatures, and that old nameless fear we used to bar the door against. Yet in one guise or another, Fear still was at the gate. Yesterday the menace of Bettina's illness. To-day a hop-picker, bringing a whiff of the sick world's infection through our windows. To-morrow? CHAPTER VII A SHOCK When to-morrow came we knew. We had been using up our capital. Another year, at this rate, and it would be gone. What was to become of us? Should we have to sell Duncombe House? I asked. Only then we heard that Duncombe belonged to Lord Helmstone. But the rent was low. My mother said "at the worst," we would go on living at Duncombe. Yes, even if we kept only one servant instead of three. For we would still have the tiny pension granted an officer's widow. And should we always have the pension? Yes, as long as she lived. Not "always" then. * * * * * A horrible feeling of helplessness, a sense of the bigness of the world and of our littleness, came down upon me. We seemed to have almost no relations. We knew our father had a step-sister, a good deal older than he. We heard that she lived in London and was childless. That was all. My mother had been an orphan. She never seemed to want to talk about the past. When we were little we took no interest in these things. As we grew older we grew afraid of paining her with questions. In some crisis of house-cleaning a photograph came to the surface. Who was this with the hair rolled high and the pear-shaped earrings? Oh, that was Mrs. Harborough. "Aunt Josephine?" "Well, your father's step-sister." All hope of better acquaintance with her was dashed by learning that she had opposed our father's marriage, opposed it bitterly. "She couldn't have known you," Bettina said. "That I was not known to her was crime enough," my mother answered with unwonted bitterness.