Some old age is lovely—radiant with the chastened light of eventide. Mrs. Skinner's was certainly unlovely. Tall and spare, with sharp pinched features, and thin pitiless lips, from which very few kindly words had ever fallen, and where a smile was almost unknown—she was an almost friendless woman. She who had never rendered a neighbour a kindly service neither expected nor received any from others. She had the reputation of being a cross-grained old woman, who had driven her only daughter away by her unkindness, and had spent what love she had upon her two sons, who suited her in many ways far better than her daughter. The youngest of these—Bertha's father—had married a woman much older than himself, and Bertha was his orphan child, her mother having died at her birth. She had been taken to live with her grandmother, at the dying wish of her father: what maternal affection she possessed responded to this last request of her youngest son, and Bertha had known no other home.
It was a home, as far as the shelter of a roof and food and clothing went; and the education of Miss Bayliff's school, given somewhat grudgingly, was to be granted till Bertha was fifteen.
"Then she must work for her living," Mrs. Skinner had said; "and," she added, "few people would have done what I have done."
"A great deal too much!" Joe would say when his mother indulged in this self-congratulation—"a great deal too much; and I, for one, don't approve of this girl being nursed in idleness; it was the ruin of Maggie."
Mrs. Skinner winced a little at the name; for Maggie had disappeared, and no trace could be found of her.
She had been, so those who remembered her said, of a very different type to her family, as if she had dropped down from the clouds into it.
That was long ago now, but the people who could look back some years in the neighbourhood where Mrs. Skinner lived could remember this bright, gay girl disappearing, and the mother's reply to any inquiry—
"I know nothing about her, nor do I wish to know. She has been and made her bed, and she must lie on it."
Report said that Maggie had married against her mother's wish, and that she had literally turned her out of her house. This was about all that was ever heard, and nothing was really known. Any attempt to question Mrs. Skinner was met by a sharp rebuff, and very few people, even the boldest, dare approach her even with an attempt to find out what she chose to keep secret.
Mrs. Skinner and her son Joe lived in a detached red brick house, built long before villas with bay windows and gabled roofs, and little dormer windows in them, were thought of. It was a straight little house, with a window on each side of the door, and three above it, a lean-to at the back, and a square of garden in front. The path to the door was of pebbles, and they always made a disagreeable crunching sound as the feet of any comers to the house walked over them. That was not often; and the little iron gate grated on its hinges, it was so seldom opened, as Mr. Boyd pushed it back to admit the two girls.