From that day Umbrage had not seen the Shepherd personally again and had not heard his voice. She had occasionally seen him afar off, passing along the street, leading his flock, or talking to one or another of the shepherds; but from the day she married Resentment, knowing that she could never invite the Chief Shepherd into her home—from that day she had had no personal contact with him at all. And poor Umbrage had experienced the agony of those who have once known him and now know him no more.

“For souls that once have looked upon their Lord

Must die, or look again.”

One day, when her husband was away as usual at the bank, and old Mrs. Sullen, in one of her difficult moods, was shut up in her own room, Umbrage, dreary and miserable and almost in despair, took her little three-year-old daughter into a secluded part of the garden to escape from the curious eyes of the servants, who, she well knew, spied upon her continually at the old lady’s orders and repeated to her all her doings.

The little girl was her only comfort, a sweet little thing whom the old grandmother was always trying to coax up to her own room and to spoil. Little Retaliation (for Resentment had insisted on giving his mother’s maiden name to his daughter), though her pet name was Tit-for-Tat, had already begun to understand that if her mother forbade her anything, she had but to toddle off to grandmother to get what she wanted, along with a commiserating kiss and a candy (“for Grannie knew what little girls liked even if Mamma did not!”). And Umbrage had come to realize, with a cold sickening of her heart, that her mother-in-law was not only her implacable rival in her husband’s affections but that she was using every possible means to come between her and her child too. This terrible realization had brought her to the point of utter despair.