This Freedom

d first floors, that were never used, were unfurnished except for odds and ends of lumber left behind by the previous vicar, and were never enter

whom she never saw and never could find. It used to frighten her sometimes, lying awake at night, or creeping about the house of an evening, to think of those two m

es Rosalie had heard him, when talking to persons not of the family, speak of "my wif

pprehension before entering the untenanted rooms upstairs, she explored the whole house in search of them. She got to know all sorts of little odds and ends about them; that the wife felt the cold very much, for instance, for she had heard her father say so; and that the husband did not like mutton, for her mother told tha

myste

e was profoundly interested in these people and used to feel awfully sorry for them, hidden

ing and couldn't come. Rosalie during the service prayed very earnestly for the wife's recovery and took the opportunity of praying also that s

the morning, there was suddenly shot out of her t

ngle direct speech of those early years she ever could remember. She spoke to her father when she was bidden to speak in the form of messages, generally about meals being ready, or relative to shopping commissions he had been

ith astounded eyes, forks suspended in mid-air, mouths half open in astonishment, and Rosalie

than before, because it was so very unusual for the family to be laughing in accord with father

go and ask your mother." Her mother h

Rosalie slid down very gravely, and with their laughter still echoing trod upstairs to her mother's bedside and related what she had been told to ask, and, on in

remendous mystery. Wife and husband, Rosalie's mother explained, were the names used by other people for her father and her mother. A man and a woman loved one another very, very dearly (

d procreation completely satisfied Anna at sixteen and Harold in the Bank at eighteen. She never gave them any other explanation of the phenomenon of birth; and it is to be supposed that, just as she instructed them that God sent the dear little children, so she believed that God, at the right time, in some mysterious way, communicated the

the graces and the manners of this day's generation one perceives, proudly, the inestimable benefits of the passing of her kind. Lamentable specimen of her kind, she had no interests other than her home and her husband and her children and the pleasures and the treasures and the friends of her

been in that case and at the bottom of one drawer or another ever since the girl Anna Escott, aged twenty, had placed them in the case, then exquisitely blue and new and sof

exedly, her mother on what proved to be her death bed. She was tidying her mother's drawers, impatient with the amazing collection of rubbish they contained and hating herself for bein

er she had painted them. "I used to do tha

readful flood of emotion. She set down the case on the bed and flung

eloved little mother!" But

lopment, gave it up wholly and entirely and forever when her mother died and her father said, "I

I will, Papa. It's my

ands asked them to do that, in the d

n stories of her own making, and from the Bible itself. Regrettably, the ignorantly imposed-upon children loved it! Till each child was eight she taught them everything at her knee. All the nursery rhymes, and all the Bible, and reading out of "Step by Step," and then "Reading Without Tears," and then, in advancing series, the "Royal Readers," and writing, first holding their hands, and then-first in pencil and afterwards with pens having three huge blobs to teach you how to place your fingers properly-in cop

er girl or boy, the making of kettle-holders by threading brightly coloured wools through little squares of canvas; also very many pieces of poetry: "Oft had I heard of Lucy Grey," a

d when the books were fresh and clean, and Rosalie's mother fresh and ardent with her first-born, to 1884, when Rosalie was being taught, and the books very old and thumbed and most terribly crowded with pencil marks, and Rosalie's mother no longer fresh but rather worn, but teaching as fondly and earnestly as ever, because it was her duty. Literally at the knee of Rosalie's mother these things wer

never rested and she was always worried. Her brows were always wrinkled with the feverish concentration of one anxio

er had a driving a

se and venting his griefs upon his house. Rosalie's mother was a tragic figure and she was a tragic slave in the house of bondage. The life of Rosalie's father was a tragedy, but a tragedy in some measure relieved because he knew it was a trag

ference between the tragedy of