"I answered her quite frankly. 'Because I'm a poor woman, Lady A., and I find the genteel professions too hard for me.' 'Well,' she said, 'you are everything I could desire as a maid, but I'm going to do better for you than leave you at the mercy of a heartless woman of fashion like myself, and in a perfectly anomalous position. Besides, you make me look a hag beside you. I shudder when I see your face near mine in the glass. I'm taking back Cecile, an unscrupulous wretch, but an admirable maid, for I'm more comfortable with her. And I'm going to send you to Mrs. Des Vœux, an exquisite old blind lady in Devonshire, for whom you will read and write and cut roses--that's all. I've kept you so long to make sure you'd be good to her. And now I am sure.'" "She arranged it for you like that?" "Yes, just like that. I was to have gone to Mrs. Des Vœux in a short time after I left Lady A., so I came home and imprudently spent all my money. Then it happened that the lady whom I was to replace, whose marriage was leaving the vacancy for me, had to postpone her departure for six months. So I was rather thrown on my beam-ends, and that is how I had the pleasure of making Mrs. Tatlow's acquaintance." "And I suppose Mrs. Des Vœux's will be a case of 'and they lived happy ever afterwards'?" Freda gave a little shudder. "Oh, no, Hilda! I hope I shall have a house of my own one day, though I don't see how it's going to happen. Servitude is all very well so long as one is young, but--" she ended with an expressive little gesture, flinging out both her hands. "Freda," said I impulsively, "have you ever had an offer of marriage in those years of your wanderings?" "An embarrassment, Hilda. My suitors have ranged in age from sixteen to sixty--nay, seventy-five--and in eligibility from the ownership of a pocket-knife and three white mice to the ownership of an iron-foundry and a steam yacht." "And you never met anyone you could say 'yes' to?" Freda's merry face changed all at once, and a wounded red flew into her soft, pale cheeks. "You are only a child, Hilda," she said coldly, "and so I forgive you." "Oh, Freda," I cried, "I didn't think you'd care so much!" "I am Jim's wife," she answered, "as well as Jim's widow!" CHAPTER XXII. BOOKS AND SOLDIERS. The day after I saw Freda I went with General MacNeill to call on his friend, Mr. Linklater. I can tell you my heart beat as we went in through the narrow nest of streets that make the publishing quarter, and I saw names on the street corners that told me we were in the heart of my Mecca. Paternoster Row, Ave Maria Lane, Amen Corner,--I whispered the names to myself as softly as though I were a votary. We went through a narrow passage into a kind of shop on the first-floor of a tall house, but no one was buying or selling. Only a clerk sat at a desk, with a pen behind his ear, amid walls of books in bundles of brown paper, or standing in piles in their outer wrappings.