“Where else?” cried Lady Frogmore; “is not my child there? and in her hands.” She was too impatient to accept the usual services of her maid, but dressed herself in wild haste, her trembling hands tying strings and fastening buttons all wrong. Her two attendants could do little but look on as in her agitation she snatched at everything. The gentle Mary, always so tranquil and mild, was transfigured with passion and eagerness. When she heard that it was loo late for the morning train, it was a shriek rather than a cry which burst from her breast. “Oh, why did you let me sleep? Why did I sleep?” she cried bitterly. There was no possibility of calming her, no means of explaining how they had arranged everything for her comfort that she might rest after her unusual excitement and exhaustion. She, rest! Mary, who had been the object of unceasing care for years, whose every mood had been considered, and from whom everybody near warded and kept off any possible shade of annoyance, forgot all that in a moment. She became the Mary of old, she who was Letitia’s right hand, she who spared no trouble, who thought of everybody but herself. Mary was as much surprised at being the first to be thought of, at having her rest cared for, as if that long time of care and observance had never been. “Rest for me,” she cried. “You should have known better, Agnes--you might have known I should not rest till I have seen my boy.” She woke without a cloud upon her memory of that fact, but with this new dread sprung up in her mind which could not be calmed down. They set off in time for a later train after a weary interval of waiting, an interval that seemed to both as if it would never end. Mary had been seized in the new sense of motherhood with a panic and fear of alarm which nothing could quench. She who had forgiven everything to Letitia, who had thought of nothing either in her madness or her recovery but the interests of her former friend, now feared her as if she were a criminal, and felt that every moment the heir remained in her hands was a moment of danger. “She will do him no harm,” Agnes tried to say. “She is not kind. She does not love him, but she will do him no harm.” Mary would not listen to this voice of reason. The woman who had wished that the unborn child should grow up an idiot and kill his parents appeared in no light but that of a possible murderess to her who had newly discovered his existence and that she was his mother. She waved off her sister’s soothing words. She put Agnes herself--Agnes who had loved him always, who had been his first guardian, all the mother he had ever known--in a secondary place as one who could not divine the passion of the mother love. “It is easy for you to speak,” she said, crying out in her impatience that the horses crept, that they would be too late for the train, and then that the train itself was like a country cart, and would not go. Then there came those long waitings at