I put my hands before my eyes as if to shade them from the light; but Eleanor is very quick, and she found out that I was crying.

She jumped up and threw herself at my feet.
"Margery, dear Margery! what _is_ the matter ?" I could only sob, "My mother, O my mother!" and add, almost bitterly, "It is very well for you to write about your childhood, who have had a mother--and such a mother!--all your life; but for me----" Eleanor knelt straight up, with her teeth set, and her hands clasped before her.
"I do think," she said slowly, "that I am, without exception, the most selfish, inconsiderate, dense, unfeeling brute that ever lived." She looked so quaintly, vehemently in earnest as she knelt in the firelight, that I laughed in spite of my tears.
"My dear old thing," I said, "it is I who am selfish, not you.

But I am going on now, and I promise to disturb you no more." And in this I was resolute, though Eleanor would have burned our papers then and there, if I had not prevented her.
Indeed she knew as well as I did that it was not merely because I was an orphan that I wept, as I thought of my early childhood.

We could not speak of it, but she knew enough to guess at what was passing through my mind.

I was only six years old when my mother died, but I can remember her.