‘Heard him die!’

      ‘You heard him die? What did you hear?’

      ‘A sound I heard once before in my life – at the deathbed of my mother. I could not identify it – though I recognized it. Then the dog howled: you remarked it. I did not think it worth while to tell you what I had heard a little earlier.’ She looked agonized.

      ‘It would have been useless,’ said Miss Aldclyffe. ‘All was over by that time.’ She addressed herself as much as Cytherea when she continued, ‘Is it a Providence who sent you here at this juncture that I might not be left entirely alone?’

      Till this instant Miss Aldclyffe had forgotten the reason of Cytherea’s seclusion in her own room. So had Cytherea herself. The fact now recurred to both in one moment.

      ‘Do you still wish to go?’ said Miss Aldclyffe anxiously.

      ‘I don’t want to go now,’ Cytherea had remarked simultaneously with the other’s question. She was pondering on the strange likeness which Miss Aldclyffe’s bereavement bore to her own; it had the appearance of being still another call to her not to forsake this woman so linked to her life, for the sake of any trivial vexation.

      Miss Aldclyffe held her almost as a lover would have held her, and said musingly —

      ‘We get more and more into one groove. I now am left fatherless and motherless as you were.’ Other ties lay behind in her thoughts, but she did not mention them.

      ‘You loved your father, Cytherea, and wept for him?’

      ‘Yes, I did. Poor papa!’

      ‘I was always at variance with mine, and can’t weep for him now! But you must stay here always, and make a better woman of me.’