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Rh and made 'em hard an' forgetful of all he's done. They'd never have spoke so if they'd been theirselves."

She could scarcely have told what she had heard, or how the first blow had struck home. She only knew that here and there she had heard at first a rough jeer and then a terrible outspoken story, which, in spite of her disbelief, filled her with dread. The man who first flung the ill-favored story at her stopped half-way through it, the words dying on his lips at the sight of her face.

It happened in one of her pensioners' cottages, and she rose from her chair trembling.

"I didn't think," she said, with unconscious pathos, "as the world could be so ignorant and wicked."

But as the ill-feeling became more violent, she met with the same story again and again, and often with new and worse versions in forms she could not combat. She began to be haunted by vague memories of things she had not comprehended. A sense of pain followed her. She was afraid, at times, to go to the cottages, lest she should be confronted with something which would overwhelm her. Then she began to search her son's face with a sense of finding some strangeness in it. She watched him wistfully when he had so far forgotten her presence as to be almost unaware of it. One night, having thrown himself upon a sofa and fallen into a weary sleep, he suddenly started up from it to find her standing close by him, looking down, her face pale, her locked fingers moving nervously.

"What is it?" he exclaimed. "What ails you?"

He was startled by her falling upon her knees at his side, crying, and laying her shaking hand upon his shoulder.

"You was having a bad dream, my dear," she said