"Still, I think Aline will be hurt, Freda. You should have trusted her." "Ah! well, if I did wrong I was punished. I have felt often and often that you must all think me such a mean wretch, rolling in riches, and never doing anything for any of you. I often felt inclined to throw it up and confess. Perhaps I distrusted myself, for there have been times when I grew tired of the struggle, and if Aline had known and had said 'Come', I would have been spiritless enough to come, and to stay. Still, the times have not been many," she said more brightly. "The world has not been bad to me, as a whole, and I had always my dear old friend to come to, and she kept my boy for me, more tenderly than I could myself." "This room is really pretty, Freda." "The rooms are all pretty, I think, because a woman like Mary Vincent dwells in them, and imparts something of the fragrance of herself to them. In Magnolia Cottage it is possible to forget Grove Avenue." "And just think, Freda; we took your house, from the extreme rurality of its title, to be situated in a delicious country place." "We rather run to rural titles in our London slums. See, over there is the 'Daisies', and next door the 'Grass-plot', yonder the 'Hawthorns' and the 'Laburnums' face each other." "Who lives in them?" "Usually working-men and their very large families. We're considered guilty of sinful waste, so Polly, our handmaiden, tells us, because we don't let lodgings. But come upstairs and see the rest of the domicile. You'll take off your hat and cloak and stay for a good long day. Oh, by the way, you haven't told me yet how you come to be here!" I told her, as I was taking off my hat and washing my hands,--which I was surprised to find seemed to require constant washing in London,--about the General, and his business and my business, and that I had not to meet him till six o'clock. "How lucky I was at home!" she cried. "We are going to have such a long long gossip, for though Aline's so faithful a letter-writer there are a thousand-and-one things that never get into letters. Yet, if you had come last week you would have found only Mrs. Vincent and Jacky. I have just left a place, and am going on to another next week." "You poor dear!" said I. "The last must have been a very nasty place, to make you look so tired as you did when you came in." "It was rather nasty," she said, "but the next is going to be much nicer. It is in a lovely part of Devonshire too, and I shall like the lady to whom I am going." When we had left the pretty little chintz-hung bedroom and were seated at the fire downstairs, I asked Freda how it was she came to be so poor. "Jim had saved nothing," she said. "He always meant to, poor love, but he was so generous, and then he never could have feared that his wife and boy would want. You know his parents are extremely wealthy, and he was their favourite son." "Yet they let you want."