"'My daughter Helena died and was buried long ago. You may be her ghost for aught I know or care. In any case, this is no place for you: within this door you can never enter: under this roof you can never come. Go! I have no daughter. I am childless and a widow.' "'But, madam--mother, hear me! I am your daughter--I----' "'I tell you that I have no daughter,' she interrupted, in her cold, imperative way. 'My daughter fell into shame, and then to me she became as utterly dead as if the ocean were rolling over her bones: dead in heart and dead in memory. You are an impostor. Go!' "'Oh! mother, listen to me. I am not an impostor. I am your own daughter Helena. No shame clings to my name. My husband is dead, and this is the only place in the wide world where I can ask for shelter or a crust of bread.' "'Not so much as a crust of bread shall you ever have from me. You know my will. Go at once and never darken this door again. When you die, may you die uncared for and unknown! May your eyes be closed by the hands of strangers, and may the hands of strangers lay you in your grave! Go!' "Speaking thus, Lady Pollexfen faded back into the darkness. Slowly and resistlessly the door was closed: slowly and deliberately the great bolts were pushed into their sockets: the silk dress rustled; the ribbon of light shone for a moment under the door; then all was darkness and silence, and I was alone. "I crept away from the cruel door into the less cruel night. The night and the snow seemed like friends that would wrap me round, and tend me, and hush me into a sleep that should know no waking in this bitter world. I was like one on whose soul sits some awful nightmare which makes him seem, even in his own eyes, something other than himself. I knew that the woman who had smitten me with those cruel words was my mother, but I was past wondering at that, or at anything else. All that had befallen me was only in the common course of events, and it was quite right and proper that I should be walking there alone at that hour, with my back turned to the roof that should have sheltered me, and with no spot in all the wide world on which I could claim to lay my head. In my heart there was no bitterness; only a dull, vague longing for peace and rest and a deep winding-sheet of snow. There was something within me that would allow me neither pause nor rest till I had left the park of Dupley Walls behind. I had shunned the ordinary lodge-entrance, and had gained access to the grounds through a stile in a bye-lane, connected with which is a right of footpath across one corner of the estate. I went back by the same road, and at length recognised in a bewildered sort of way that I was out of the park and had all the world before me where to choose. A light snow was still falling, but the wind had died down, and with it had gone that intensity of cold from which I had suffered before. I dragged myself slowly onward, but more by a sort of instinct than by any exertion of