Page:E Nesbit - Man and Maid (1906).djvu/214

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told him most things, but, I imagine, not all. But the mother was content without spoken confidences. She knew that Maisie had suffered, and that now she had her little girl again, to wrap warm in her love as before. This was happiness enough.

This story, I know, is instructive enough for a Sunday School prize. It ought to be tagged at the end with a Moral. I can’t help it: it is true. Of course, it is not what usually happens. Many companions, no doubt, marry Honourable James’s, or even Dukes, and are never at all glad to get home to their mothers and their Edwards. But Maisie was different. She feels now a sort of grateful tenderness for Yalding Towers, because, but for the dream she dreamed there she might never have really awakened—never have known fully and without mistake what it was in life that she truly cared for. And such knowledge is half the secret of happiness. That, by the way, is really the moral of this story.