There had been so few troubles in her life, and looking back at the smooth sunlit ways by which she had wandered from childhood to womanhood, she was seized all at once with a fear that there must be some great grief in store for her. It was quite impossible that she could have altogether withheld herself from some contemplation of that startling question as to her right to be happy in a world where so many people were miserable; but the question had never intruded itself upon her so awfully as to-night. “I have never had sickness, or death, or sorrow near me,” she thought. “My mother died before I was conscious of her existence--as I think--and yet it seems strange that there can be any time when a child is unconscious of a mother’s presence, or heedless of her loss. The worst trouble that I can remember is my parting from Harcourt; and I have always hoped that all would come right at last. But to-night--to-night I feel as if there had been something sinful in my happiness. The sermons I have heard at church never came home to me. I never felt that I was a miserable, sinful creature, groping my way upon a thorny path. I’m afraid I have been very wicked; selfish and idle, vain and frivolous.” Looking back at her life, Miss Hillary saw an existence of Twickenham pleasure, water-parties, and pic-nics, Star-and-Garter dinners, perpetual Parisian bonnets, and turquoise bracelets, pet dogs, new novels, opera-boxes, and concert-tickets. Perhaps she had never before watched and waited alone at these still hours of the dead winter-night, and these unusual thoughts may have been only the natural companions of her loneliness. She looked at her watch a dozen times in an hour, and at last, when it was nearly three o’clock, her patience was exhausted all at once, and she resolved on going down to her father’s room. “He will be very angry with me for sitting up so late,” she thought, “but I _cannot_ go to bed until I have seen him. It will be better to see him ever so cross with me than not to see him at all.” Having once arrived at this determination, Maude Hillary ran down stairs and tapped lightly at her father’s door. There was no answer, and she repeated that timid tapping. Again there was no answer, and she tried the handle of the door, intending to steal softly in and surprise the merchant at his work. But the door was locked, and her breath grew thick with the sudden oppression caused by some vague terror. She lost all command over herself, and knocked loudly, calling in a frightened voice, “Papa! papa!” It was not so strange that she should be frightened. How often she had heard of hard-working City magnates suddenly stricken down in the prime of life by some fell disease, unsuspected until that last fatal moment!