ly rarely used voice. Up to the time that Joan first sang to the child, she had never sung in her life. She caught herself one day half chanting a lullaby she had heard Anice sing. The sound of her own voice was so novel to her, that she paused all at once in her walk across the room, prompted by a queer impulse to listen.
"It moight ha' been somebody else," she said. "I wonder what made me do it. It wur a queer thing."
Sometimes Derrick met Joan entering the Rectory (at which both were frequent visitors); sometimes, passing through the hall on her way home; but however often he met her, he never felt that he advanced at all in her friendship.
On one occasion, having bidden Anice good-night and gone out on the staircase, Joan stepped hurriedly back into the room and stood at the door as if waiting.
"What is it?" Anice asked.
Joan started. She had looked flushed and downcast, and when Anice addressed her, an expression of conscious self-betrayal fell upon her.
"It is Mester Derrick," she answered, and in a moment she went out.
Anice remained seated at the table, her hands clasped before her.
"Perhaps," at last she said aloud, "perhaps this is what is to be done with her. And then—" her lips tremulous,—"it will be a work for me to do."
Derrick's friendship and affection for herself held no germ of warmer feeling. If she had had the slightest doubt of this, she would have relinquished nothing. She had no exaggerated notions of self-immolation. She would not have given up to another woman what Heaven had given to herself, any more than she would have striven
