at her rather ungainly brown hands and laughed, simply because she
was ashamed of the unwonted tightening at her throat and the queer
stinging of tears beneath her eyelids. Thus Sarah departed under the
impression that Miss Jane had grown up into a rather a heartless
young lady. But Fraulein and Jebbie never knew why, from that day
onward, the hands, of which they had so often had cause to complain,
were kept scrupulously clean; and on her birthday night, unashamed
in the quiet darkness, the lonely little child kissed her own hands
beneath the bedclothes, striving thus to reach the tenderness of her
dead mother's lips.

And in after years, when she became her own mistress, one of her
first actions was to advertise for Sarah Matthews and engage her as
her own maid, at a salary which enabled the good woman eventually to
buy herself a comfortable annuity.

Jane saw but little of her father, who had found it difficult to
forgive her, firstly, for being a girl when he desired a son;
secondly, being a girl, for having inherited his plainness rather
than her mother's beauty. Parents are apt to see no injustice in the
fact that they are often annoyed with their offspring for possessing
attributes, both of character and appearance, with which they
themselves have endowed them.

The hero of Jane's childhood, the chum of her girlhood and the close
friend of her maturer years, was Deryck Brand, only son of the
rector of the parish, and her senior by nearly ten years. But even
in their friendship, close though it was, she had never felt herself
first to him. As a medical student, at home during vacations, his
mother and his profession took precedence in his mind of the lonely