The cry she had herself uttered, much to her parents' alarm; what her mother held was in reality only a paper-knife, with which she had been tapping her lips in thought.

A slight attack of illness followed on this disturbance, and it was some days before she recovered from the shock; she kept to herself, however, the horrible picture which her imagination had conjured up.
She began to pay more frequent visits to her aunt Theresa, whom at first she had seen very seldom.

There was not the old confidence between them.

Maud shrank from any direct reference to the change in herself, and Miss Bygrave spoke no word which could suggest a comparison between past and present.

Maud tried once more to draw near to the pale, austere woman, whose life ever remained the same.