“Don’t you?” said the other, in surprise.

“No. A good number of people love me, I believe, or at least they think they do; but I never seem to care much for any one. I do believe I love you, little Molly, whom I have only known for ten days, better than any one.’

“Not than your mother?” said Molly, in grave astonishment.

“Yes, than my mother!” replied Cynthia, half-smiling. “It’s very shocking, I daresay; but it is so. Now, don’t go and condemn me. I don’t think love for one’s mother quite comes by nature; and remember how much I have been separated from mine! I loved my father, if you will,” she continued, with the force of truth in her tone, and then she stopped; “but he died when I was quite a little thing, and no one believes that I remember him. I heard mamma say to a caller, not a fortnight after his funeral, ‘Oh, no, Cynthia is too young; she has quite forgotten him’—and I bit my lips, to keep from crying out, ‘Papa! papa! have I?’ But it’s of no use. Well, then mamma had to go out as a governess; she couldn’t help it, poor thing! but she didn’t much care for parting with me. I was a trouble, I daresay. So I was sent to a school at four years old; first one school, and then another; and, in the holidays, mamma went to stay at grand houses, and I was generally left with the schoolmistresses. Once I went to the Towers; and mamma lectured me continually, and yet I was very naughty, I believe. And so I never went again; and I was very glad of it, for it was a horrid place.”

“That it was!” said Molly, who remembered her own day of tribulation there.

“And once I went to London, to stay with my uncle Kirkpatrick. He is a lawyer, and getting on now; but then he was poor enough, and had six or seven children. It was winter-time, and we were all shut up in a small house in Doughty Street. But, after all, that wasn’t so bad.”

“But then you lived with your mother when she began school at Ashcombe. Mr. Preston told me that, when I stayed that day at the Manor-house.”

“What did he tell you?” asked Cynthia, almost fiercely.

“Nothing but that. Oh, yes! He praised your beauty, and wanted me to tell you what he had said.”

“I should have hated you if you had,” said Cynthia.

“Of course I never thought of doing such a thing,” replied Molly. “I didn’t like him; and Lady Harriet spoke of him the next day, as if he wasn’t a person to be liked.”

Cynthia was quite silent. At length she said—

“I wish I was good!”

“So do I,” said Molly simply. She was thinking again of Mrs. Hamley—

“Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust;”

and “goodness,” just then, seemed to her to be the only enduring thing in the world.

“Nonsense, Molly! You are good. At least, if you’re not good, what am I? There’s a rule-of-three sum for you to do! But it’s no use talking; I am not good, and I never shall be now. Perhaps I might be a heroine still, but I shall never be a good woman, I know.”

“Do you think it easier to be a heroine?”