"I think, Tetta, it must have been because I have had you by my side to love and cling to almost ever since I can remember, that I have missed my mother as little as I seem to have. You have filled her place to me. I have grown up under your hands, molded by you so far as it was possible for any one to mold me. You have been to me a warm and living reality; she nothing but a dim, sweet memory. How was it possible that she should be anything more to me?" Mrs. Jenwyn lifted her eyes from her knitting and looked fixedly at Anna. On her face was an expression which seemed to transfigure it. "Suppose, my dear one," she said, and the words came brokenly and with difficulty, as though she were feeling her way like one in doubt--"mind, I only say suppose--that things had so fallen out that not Mrs. Drelincourt, but I--I--were your mother--what would you have said and thought in that case?" Anna's eyes met hers with a great wonder shining in them, not unmingled with perplexity. She drew a long breath before she spoke. "What should I have said and thought in that case--or, rather, what should I say and think now? I should thank Heaven on my knees for having given me a living mother in the place of a dead one, and one whom I could love from the bottom of my heart, as I have loved you from childhood." Here she rose impulsively from her chair, and making three steps forward, she went down on her knees before Mrs. Jenwyn and laid her clasped hands on the other's lap. "But, oh, Tetta, what do you mean--what _do_ you mean by asking me such a question?" On her face was the radiance of a dawning hope. Expectation sat on her parted lips; her bosom rose and fell quickly. Mrs. Jenwyn bent forward and touched Anna's sunny hair with her lips. "Oh, my darling, cannot you guess?" she said, in a voice shaken with emotion. "I am your mother--I, and not another!" It was a quarter of an hour later when Mrs. Jenwyn began her confession--for nothing less than that could it be called. As a matter of course, certain things--not necessarily everything--must be told Anna in satisfaction of her legitimate curiosity, and there seemed no reason why the telling of them should not be got over and done with as speedily as possible. The two were seated side by side on a couch, and Anna held one of her mother's hands in hers as the latter proceeded with her narrative. "My father, the Rev. George Wynter, was a poor curate in a rural district, with little or no hope of preferment, and when, at the age of sixteen, I was offered the post of companion to Miss Lemoine, of Waterend, he was only too pleased that I should accept it, and so lighten the burden at home.