Alas for Julia’s inexperienced notions of a governess’s existence! She found herself the drudge of an exacting mistress, with every hour of her dreary life mapped out and allotted for her, with less share in the social pleasures of the house she lived in than if she had been the kitchen-maid, and with two small tyrants in crinkled hair and holland pinafores always on the watch to detect her shortcomings, and to twist them into excuses for their own. The dreadful monotony of her life would alone have made it odious; but Julia had “a sorrow’s crown of sorrow” perpetually pressing on her tortured brow. She had the recollection of happier things--the pleasant idleness at the Cedars, the position of Francis Tredethlyn’s affianced wife. And she had given up this position in one moment of ungovernable rage and jealousy. She had suffered one mad impulse of her proud nature to undo the slow work of months. Miss Desmond had ample leisure for the contemplation of her folly during the long winter evenings which she spent in a third-floor sitting-room at Bayswater, hearing unwilling children grind hopelessly at a German grammar by the light of two guttering tallow-candles. She _did_ contemplate her folly, while the guttural verbs and declensions fell with a droning noise on her unlistening ears; but the rage which swelled her bosom was against Maude Hillary, and Maude alone. She saw Maude’s carriage in the Park sometimes, while she took her allotted walk with the unwilling children, who might have been pleasant children enough, perhaps, if they had not been weighed down by intellectual exercises compared to which the enforced physical labours of Toulon would have seemed light and agreeable. Julia saw her old companion, and her mind went back to the sunny afternoons on the lawn at Twickenham; and the sight of the pretty face and golden hair, the Skye terriers and neatly appointed equipage, stirred the fire of hatred always burning in her breast, until she could almost have shaken her small fist at the merchant’s daughter. She saw the announcement of Maude’s marriage in the “Times,” and hated her still more. She saw Maude in the Park, after her marriage, in a more splendid equipage than the landau from the Cedars, and she hated her even more and more. She set her teeth together, and drew back under the shadow of the trees to watch Francis Tredethlyn’s wife drive by. “She has cheated me out of it all,” she thought; “it would all have been mine but for her treachery.” Then one bright and sunny afternoon in early May the two women met,--Julia a wan shadow of her former self, worn out with hard work, depressed by the monotony of her life, indifferent as to her dress and appearance; Maude a beaming creature in gauzy mauve muslin, with a Watteau skirt, all a-flutter with ribands, and a voluminous train sweeping the dust behind her. “Dear Julia----” “Maude--Mrs. Tredethlyn!”