back, and what to reveal, was a momentous and unanswerable question. Long and painfully she pondered it, but no new light broke in upon the troubled darkness of her spirit; for the trying ordeal must be met, and to-*morrow would surely bring it.
At last she made up her mind that she would steadfastly refuse all explanation whatever. Alice could not force it from her, and she should not. She might, indeed, question—no doubt she would; but what then? She had held her own sad secret for more than eighteen years—should a mere child have power to wring it from her now?
With this fallacious hope, of the insecurity of which she was but too well aware, she tried to fortify herself for the coming interview; but it was with a new and strange feeling of constraint on both sides that the grandmother and her child met each other the next morning.
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