"They didn't know. I must do them that much justice. They thought I was left comfortably. But they must have had a strange opinion of me, for they offered to adopt my Jacky and make him heir to all their money. I took the suggestion as an insult, and walked out of the house. I have never heard of them since, and I am sure Jacky and I have disappeared as effectually from their ken as if the sea had opened and swallowed us." "What horrid people!" cried I impulsively. "They are very good people in their own way," answered Freda quietly. "But they are bitterly prejudiced, Lady Hazeldine especially. It was a great blow to her when Jim married a wild Irish girl. Especially as she had wanted him to marry a great pet of hers, a city heiress named Cicely Lambton. She had wished for it almost from the babyhood of both, for she and Mrs. Lambton were school-friends. I believe she thought that if Jim had married an English girl he would not have died." "Stupid woman!" said I, not knowing how to express my indignation against Jim's mother to Jim's widow. "Why, she ought to have loved you a thousand times better because you loved Jim and he loved you, and you both have lost him." "That doesn't always follow, little Hilda. Perhaps I shall not love the woman who will, one day, step into the first place in Jacky's heart and evict me." "Tell me, Freda," said I, "have you had horrible times? Is it so bad for her 'who fareth up and down another's stairs'?" "I don't know," she said thoughtfully. "I have met hard and unkind, as well as gentle and kind people. Yet, on the whole, I am not sorry that I have had to work. It would have been worse if I had had to sit down with folded hands and look at the wreck of my life,--worse surely amid the Hazeldine luxury, worse even at dear Brandon. Ah, no, no! work has made it possible for me to live." Her face had assumed a very tragic expression, the face now of a woman of many sorrows. "It has been sweet too," she went on, her tense expression relaxing a little, "to help to keep up this little home. Always, if things grew too hard for me, there were peace and love waiting for me here. Ah, the poor women without such a spot on earth!--how I pity them! And then there was always saving up for me a delicious thing that I looked at in my moments of leisure, the thought of coming home to Jacky." Her face softened, and went back into the little roundnesses and dimples I remembered. Then she laughed, and it was like the sun coming out. "Why, here is Jacky!" she cried out; and I saw a sweet-faced elderly woman and a swaggering small sailor pass the little bow-window. She ran out and opened the door, and with a word to her friend came back, proudly leading her son. [Illustration: "FREDA CAME BACK, PROUDLY LEADING HER SON."] "Hullo!" said he, with the free manner of a born son of Neptune, "you're a pretty girl, but you aren't half as pretty as my Muddie!"