Her voice, stammering and anxious, and growing more and more eager as she found herself allowed to proceed, died away at last into a fateful silence. Mrs. Clapham had kept her eyes fixed upon her while she talked, but as soon as she ended she turned them from her. She was saying to herself that perhaps she had been wrong in thinking that there was no possible choice. There _was_ a choice, after all, and it was perhaps only fair that she should be asked to make it. In face of her new doubts as well as her new and amazing pity for Emma, she could not simply sweep her pretensions off the board. Never again would she seem to her quite the same woman as before she had disappeared under that apron. Slowly she turned the recent revelation over in her mind, weighing and sifting and making ready for judgment. Was it possible, she thought to herself, that she had been wrong about Emma—that they had all been wrong, Stephen and Tibbie included? Nobody really knew what went on behind closed doors, and whether they spoke truth who brought stories to those without. Nobody really knew to whose account sorrows and sins would be placed at the last day. The charwoman, with the iron sunk in her soul, said to herself that she had been mistaken in God’s goodness; might it not also be possible that she had been mistaken in Emma’s badness? Repentance, at least, was possible, even for the worst, and in Emma’s passionate outburst she had seemed to discern the ring of truth. Perhaps she really did think that she could make atonement through the children, and was full of a hunger and ache to pay her debt. Deep as was Mrs. Clapham’s yearning towards them because they were Tibbie’s, she knew that the loss of them would not break her heart. Undoubtedly, it was Emma who had the right to them, if she was speaking the truth; but who was prepared to say that Emma was speaking the truth! It was at this point that she extended her bitter resentment to old Mr. T.—old Mr. T., who, only a few hours before, had seemed like an angel out of the past. While she was in his house she had been so grateful to him that she had cried, admiring and loving him for his kindly thought. Now she suddenly felt that he was only a stupid old man, after all. He had seemed at the time to be making her a splendid gift, while all that he was really doing for her was to tie her hands. He had been silly enough to imagine that, by making that rule, he was ensuring his old folks’ comfort and peace, whereas all that he had ensured for this one at least was her total exclusion from Heaven. Old Mr. T. went the way of all her other ideals which had been intact only that very morning. God had failed her at one blow, and the glamour for which He stood; and along with God and the beauty of life went foolish old Mr. T....