Susie had thrown away her work in the ease of being alone. It was an ease to her, and the only solace possible. She put her arms on the table and her face upon them, and found the relief which women get in tears. It is but a poor relief; yet it gives a sort of refreshment. Her burning and scorched eyelids were softened--and the sense of scrutiny removed, and freedom to look and cry as she would, was good. But the thronging thoughts that had been kept in check by that need of keeping a steady front to the world, which is at once an appalling necessity and a support to women, came now with a wilder rush and took possession altogether of her being. How was it that he had appeared again, that spectre whom she had feared since she was a child, yet for whom by moments nature had cried out in her heart, Papa! She, like John, only knew the child’s name for him, only remembered him as smiling and kind; though she had learned, as John never had learned, that other aspect of him which appeared through her mother’s eyes. Susie knew something, embittered by the feeling of the woman who had gone through it all, of the long and hopeless struggle that had filled all her own childhood, and of which she had been vaguely conscious--the struggle between a woman of severe virtue, and an uprightness almost rigid, and a man who had no moral fibre, yet so many engaging qualities, so much good humour, ease of mind, and power of adapting himself, that most people liked him, though no one approved of him: the kind of father whom little children adore, but whom his sons and daughters, as they grow up, sometimes get to loathe in his incapacity for anything serious, for any self-restraint or self-respect.