And disappointed in their desire to see Reinette, the curious and meddlesome ones turned their attention to Mrs. La Rue, but she, too, avoided and baffled them; she had returned to the cottage in town, where she remained perfectly quiet, seeing no one and talking with no one except Margery and Mr. Beresford, to the latter of whom, as a lawyer, she was always communicative, giving him any information he wished for, and aiding him materially in procuring the proof, which, though he deemed it superfluous, he was desirous to obtain. To others she had said all she ever meant to say, and on the subject of her past life, her lips were sealed forever. Silent, cold, and impassive, she moved about her house, with no look of human interest on her white, stony face, except when Margery came, as she did every day, with news of Queenie. Then the pale cheek would flush for a moment and the heavy eyes light up with eager expectancy as she asked the same question. “Has she mentioned me yet?” “No, not yet,” was always Margery’s answer, and then the color would fade away and the lips shut tightly together as if in pain, but no word of protest ever passed them, or complaint that she was not justly dealt with by the girl whose life she had blighted. It was Grandma Ferguson who stayed constantly with Queenie during the first few days after the story was known, and it was wonderful to see the love and confidence between them. With Queenie the feeling was almost idolatrous which she felt for the woman whose coarse speech and common ways had once been so obnoxious to her, but to whom she now clung with more than a child’s fondness for its mother. On her bended knees, with her head in grandma’s lap, she had confessed all the past, even to her rebellious feelings on that day when she stood on the platform at the station and was claimed by relatives of whom she had never heard. “I was so wicked and proud,” she said, “for I thought myself equal to the greatest lady in Europe, and I hated the way you spoke to me—hated everything about you and went on hating it, especially the purple gloves and moire antique, which made my elbows jerk, they so offended my eye.” And grandma forgave the beautiful little sinner, and stroked the glossy, black hair, and told her not to mind, but get up and wipe her tears away, and be comforted. “I ain’t an atom like you,” she said, “and never could be if I tried ever so hard. ’Taint the purple gloves, neither, nor the _mory antique_, which makes the difference: it is my whole make-up from the beginnin’. Some vessels is coarse, and some is fine. Some is jugs, and some is china, and I am a jug of the roughest kind, but I love you, Queenie, and will stick to you through thick and thin.” Then they talked together of Queenie’s future, and where she would go when she left Merrivale, as she was resolved upon doing, for a time at least.