Page:Life's little ironies (1894).pdf/19

along the pavement till she disappeared from view, the school-boy walking beside her. To inquiries made by some persons who watched her away, the answer came that she waa the second wife of the incumbent of a neighboring. parish, and that she was lame. She was generally believed to be a woman with a story—an innocent one, but a story of some sort or other.

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 bave missed us,” she replied.

“Has, dear mother—not have l exclaimed the public-school boy, with an impatient fastidiougness that waa 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 orumby 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 thie 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 milea from London, near the thriving county-town of Aldbrickham, there stood a pretty village with ite 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 ber present sit-