There was no one to tell her aunt what new, strange instincts and
aspirations were struggling to the light in Molly. A passionate pity for
pain would seize on her and hold her in a grip until she had done some
definite act to relieve it. But pity was either not akin to love in
Molly, or her affections had been too starved to take root after the
immediate impulse of mercy was passed. The girl was not popular in the
village, although, unlike Mrs. Carteret, her poorer neighbours had a
great idea of Molly's cleverness. Needless to say that when, after some
unmeasured effort at relieving suffering, Molly would come home with a
sense of joy she rarely knew after any other act, it hurt her to the
quick and roused her deepest anger to find herself treated like a
naughty, inconsiderate child. The storms between Mrs. Carteret and
Molly were increasing in number and intensity, with outspoken wrath on
one side, and a white heat of dumb, indignant resistance on the other.
Then, happily, there came a change. Molly's education had been of the
very slightest until she was nearly sixteen, when Mrs. Carteret told her
to expect the arrival of a finishing governess. She also announced that
a music master from the cathedral town would, in future, come over twice
a week to give her lessons.

"It's not my doing," said Mrs. Carteret,--and meaning only to be candid
she sounded very ungracious; and although she did not pay for these
things, it was due to her urgent representations of their need that they
had been provided. Molly supposed that all such financial arrangements
were made for her by her father's lawyer, of whom she had heard Mrs.
Carteret speak.

Throughout these years it had never occurred to Mrs. Carteret to doubt
that Molly believed her mother to be dead, and she never for a moment
supposed the child's silence on the subject to be ominous. Such silence