CHAPTER XIII.
Il n'y a point de passe vide ou pauvre, il n'y a point d'evenements miserables, il n'y a que des evenements miserablement accueillis .-- MAETERLINCK.
Magdalen went back to her own room, and set down her candle on the dressing-table with a hand that trembled a little.
"I ought not to have gone," she said half aloud, "and yet--I knew she was awake and in trouble.

And she nearly spoke to me to-day.

I thought--perhaps at last--the time had come like it did with Mother.

But I was wrong.

I ought not to have gone." The large room which had been her mother's, the elder Fay's, seemed to-night crowded with ghostly memories: awakened by the thought of the younger Fay sobbing in the room at the end of the passage.
In this room, in that bed, the elder Fay had died eighteen years ago.
How like the mother the child had become who had been named after her.
Magdalen saw again in memory the poor pretty apathetic mother who had taken so long to die; a grey-haired Fay, timid as the present Fay, unwise, inconsequent, blind as Fay, feebly unselfish, as alas! Fay was not.
There is in human nature a forlorn impulse, to which Mrs.Bellairs had yielded, to speak at last when the great silence draws near, of the things that have long cankered the heart, to lay upon others part of the unbearable burden of life just when death is about to remove move it.