But then burst out the horrible suspicion, which falsehood, suspecting all others of being false as itself, had engendered in that mother's heart. "Yes, viper! I see your plan! Do you think I do not know that you are in love with that fellow?" Grace started as if she had been shot, and covered her face with her hands. "Yes! and want me to betray myself--to tell a lie about myself, that you may curry favour with him--a penniless, unbelieving--" "Mother!" almost shrieked Grace, "I can bear no more! Say that it is a lie, and then kill me if you will!" "It is a lie, from beginning to end! What else should it be?" And the woman, in the hurry of her passion, confirmed the equivocation with an oath; and then ran on, as if to turn her own thoughts, as well as Grace's, into commonplaces about "a poor old mother, who cares for nothing but you; who has worked her fingers to the bone for years to leave you a little money when she is gone! I wish I were gone! I wish I were out of this wretched ungrateful world, I do! To have my own child turn against me in my old age!" Grace lifted her hands from her face, and looked steadfastly at her mother. And behold, she knew not how or why, she felt that her mother had forsworn herself. A strong shudder passed through her; she rose and was leaving the room in silence. "Where are you going, hussy? Stop!" screamed her mother between her teeth, her rage and cruelty rising, as it will with weak natures, in the very act of triumph,--"to your young man?" "To pray," said Grace, quietly; and locking herself into the empty schoolroom, gave vent to all her feelings, but not in tears. How she upbraided herself!--She had not used her strength; she had not told her mother all her heart. And yet how could she tell her heart? How face her mother with such vague suspicions, hardly supported by a single fact? How argue it out against her like a lawyer, and convict her to her face? What daughter could do that, who had human love and reverence left in her? No! to touch her inward witness, as the Quakers well and truly term it, was the only method: and it had failed. "God help me!" was her only cry: but the help did not come yet; there came over her instead a feeling of utter loneliness. Willis dead; Thurnall gone; her mother estranged; and, like a child lost upon a great moor, she looked round all heaven and earth, and there was none to counsel, none to guide-- perhaps not even God. For would He help her as long as she lived in sin? And was she not living in sin, deadly sin, as long as she knew what she was sure she knew, and left the wrong unrighted?