In conversing with her on their way home the boy who walked at her
elbow said that he hoped his father had not missed them.

'He have been so comfortable these last few hours that I am sure he
cannot have missed us,' she replied.

'HAS, dear mother--not HAVE!' exclaimed the public-school boy, with
an impatient fastidiousness that was almost harsh. 'Surely you know
that by this time!'

His mother hastily adopted the correction, and did not resent his
making it, or retaliate, as she might well have done, by bidding him
to wipe that crumby mouth of his, whose condition had been caused by
surreptitious attempts to eat a piece of cake without taking it out
of the pocket wherein it lay concealed. After this the pretty woman
and the boy went onward in silence.

That question of grammar bore upon her history, and she fell into
reverie, of a somewhat sad kind to all appearance. It might have
been assumed that she was wondering if she had done wisely in shaping
her life as she had shaped it, to bring out such a result as this.

In a remote nook in North Wessex, forty miles from London, near the
thriving county-town of Aldbrickham, there stood a pretty village
with its church and parsonage, which she knew well enough, but her
son had never seen. It was her native village, Gaymead, and the
first event bearing upon her present situation had occurred at that
place when she was only a girl of nineteen.

How well she remembered it, that first act in her little tragi-