'I think you can take care of yourself perfectly well, Henrietta,' and
like a sigh, another sentence floated from the landing where Rose
stood, out of sight: 'You are not like me.'

This was a mysterious and astonishing remark. Henrietta did not
understand it and in her excited realization that the door so
carefully locked by her own hand had been opened. Aunt Rose, she did
not try to understand it. Aunt Rose had said she was able to take care
of herself, and it was true, but honesty and a weak clinging to safety
urged her to answer, 'But you see, you see I don't want to do it!'

These words were not uttered. She stood, looking up towards the empty
landing with a hand pressed against her heart. It was beating fast.
The spirit of Reginald Mallett, subdued in his daughter for some
months, seemed to be fluttering in her breast and it was Aunt Rose who
had waked it up. It was not Henrietta's fault, she was not
responsible; and suddenly, the ordinary happiness she had been
enjoying was transferred into an irrational joy. She went singing up
the stairs, and Rose, sitting in her room in a state of limpness she
would never have allowed anybody to see, heard a sound as innocent as
if a bird had waked to a sunny dawn.

Henrietta sang, but now and then she paused and became grave when the
spirit of that mother who lived in her memory more and more dimly, as
though she had died when Henrietta was a child, overcame the spirit of
her father. Her mission was to be one of kindness to Christabel Sales,
and if--the song burst out again--if adventure came in her way, could
she refuse it? She would refuse nothing--the song ceased--short of
sin. She looked at herself and saw a solemn feminine edition of the