Harriet, formerly Harriet Chenevix, had some trouble to make both ends meet. The little baronet was fond of quoting the old saying, that he had to cut his coat according to his cloth. Therefore, when Lady Adela went to them for a prolonged stay, the ample allowance made for her to Sir Sandy was most welcome.

Upon the close of Adela's short visit to Court Netherleigh in the autumn, she returned to her mother. That visit had not been productive of any good result as regarded her cheerfulness of mind and manner; for her life seemed only to grow more dreary. Lady Acorn did not approve of this, and took care daily to let Adela know she did not, dealing out to her sundry reproaches. One day when Adela was unusually low spirited, or, as Lady Acorn called it, grumpy, the Countess made use of a threat-that she should be transported to that gloomy Swiss fastness the MacIvors had settled themselves into, and stop there until she mended her manners.

A chance word sometimes bears fruit. Adela, a faint light rising to her eyes as she heard this, lifted her voice eagerly. "Mother, let me go; send me thither as soon as you please," she said. "It will at least be better for me there than here, for I shall be out of the world."

"Out of the world!" snapped Lady Acorn.

"You can't be

much more out of it than you are down here in Oxfordshire." "Yes, I can. The neighbours, those who are at their seats in the country, come in to see us, and papa sometimes brings people home from town. Let me go to Harriet."

It was speedily decided. Lady Acorn, tart though she was with Adela, had her welfare at heart, and she thought the thorough change might be of benefit to her. An old friend, who chanced to be going abroad, took charge of Lady Adela to Geneva, Sir Sandy MacIvor and his wife met her there, and took her back with them to the château.

That was in October. Adela found the château as isolated as she could well desire, and therefore she was pleased with it, and she told Sir Sandy and Harriet she was glad to have come.

They had never thought of staying in this château for the winter; they meant to go to Rome early in December. But as that month approached, Adela evinced a great dislike to move. She would not go to Rome to encounter the English there, she told them; she would stay where she was. It a little perplexed the MacIvors: Adela had grown now so weak and low-spirited that they did not like to cross her, or to insist upon it that she must go; neither did they care to give her up as their inmate, for her allowance was of consequence to them.

"What if we make up our minds to stay here for the winter, Harriet ?" at length said Sir Sandy, who was as easy-tempered, genialhearted a little laird as could be met with in or out of Scotland; though he stood but five feet high in his shoes, and nothing could

be seen of his face save his small perky nose standing out of the mass of bright yellow hair which adorned it.

"It will be so cold," grumbled Harriet.

draughts."

"Think of all these

"They won't hurt," said the laird, who had been bred to such things, his paternal stronghold in the Highlands not being altogether air-tight. "I'll nail some list over the wind-slits, and we'll lay in a good stock of wood and keep up grand fires. It must be as you decide, of course, dear; but Adela can't be left here alone, and if we say she must go with us to Rome, she may fret herself into a fever." "She is doing that as it is," said Harriet. "We might stay here, of course-and we should get the place for an old song during the cold months. Perhaps we had better remain. Though I should like to have been in Rome for the Christmas festivities, and, later, for the carnival."

"We will go next Christmas instead of this," said Sir Sandy.

As they had no children they were not tied to their Scottish home and could lay their plans freely. It was decided to remain in the château for the winter, and Sir Sandy began hammering at the doors and windows.

So they settled down contentedly enough; and, cold though it was in spite of the list and the crackling wood fires, which certainly gave out more sparks than heat, Sir Sandy and his wife made the best of it.

It was more than could be said of Lady Adela. She not only did not make the best of things, but did not try to do so. Not that she complained of the cold, or the heat, or appeared to feel either. All seemed as one to her.

Her room was large, its great old-fashioned sofa and its heavy fauteuils covered with amber velvet. Some uncomfortable looking furniture stood about-mahogany tables and consoles with cold white marble tops. The walls of the room were papered with a running landscape, representing green plains, rivers, blue mountains, sombre pine trees, castles, and picturesque peasants at work in a vineyard. In a recess, shut off with heavy curtains, stood the bed; it was, in fact, a bed-room and sitting-room combined, as is so fre quently the case on the Continent.

In a dress of black silk and crape, worn for Margery Upton, who had died the day after Christmas-day, Lady Adela sat in this room near the wood fire. January was wearing to its close. She leaned back in the great yellow arm-chair in listless apathy, her wasted hands lying inertly on her lap, a warm cashmere shawl drawn round her, and two scarlet spots on her once blooming cheeks. The low fever, that, as predicted by Lady Harriet weeks and weeks ago, she was fretting herself into, had too surely attacked her. And she had not seemed in the least to care whether or not she died of it.

"If I die, will my death be sudden ?" she one day startled the Swiss doctor by asking him.

"You will not die, you will get well," replied Monsieur Le Brun. "If you will only be reasonable, be it understood, and second our efforts to make you so, by wishing for it yourself," he added.

"I do wish it," she murmured; though her tone was apathetical enough. "But I said to you if I die—and I want the question answered, sir. Would there be time to send for any friends from England that I may wish to see.”

"Ample time, miladi."

"Harriet," whispered she to her sister that same night, "mind you, send for Mr. Grubb when I get into that state that I cannot recover from-if I do get into it. Will you?"

"Good gracious, what next!" retorted Harriet. "Who says you will not recover?"

"I could not die in peace without seeing my husband-without asking for his forgiveness," pleaded the poor invalid, bitter tears of regret for the past slowly coursing down her cheeks. "You will be sure to send in time, won't you, Harriet?"

"Yes, yes, I promise it," answered Harriet, humouring the fancy; and she set herself to kiss and soothe her sister.

Lady Harriet MacIvor, who resembled her mother more than any of the rest, both in person and quickness of temper, had been tart enough with Adela before the illness declared itself, freely avowing that she had no patience with people who fretted themselves sick; but when the fever had really come she became a tender and efficient nurse.

The sickness and the danger passed-though, of danger, there had not perhaps been very much—and Adela was up again. With the passing, Lady Harriet resumed her tendency to set the world and its pilgrims to rights, especially Adela. January was well on now. The fever had left her very weak. In fact, it had not yet wholly taken itself away. She would recline in the large easy chair, utterly inert, day after day, recalling dreams of the past. Thinking of the luxurious home she had lost, one that might have been all brightness; picturing how she would do this and that to render it so, were the opportunity still hers.

For hours she would lose herself in recollections of the child she had lost the little boy, George. A rush of fever would pass through her veins as she recalled her behaviour at its baptism: her scornful rejection of her husband's name, Francis; her unseemly interruption from her bed to the clergyman that the name should be George. How she yearned after the little child now! Had he lived-why, surely her husband would not have put her away from him! A man may not, and does not, put away the mother of his child; it could never have been. Would she have had the child-or he? Would he have kept it, or allowed her to take it? No, no; with that

precious, living tie between them, his and hers, he could not have thrust his wife away from him. Oh, surely, surely! had that poor child but lived, he would have exercised compassion. Thus she would lie, tormenting herself with deceitful fantasies that could never be, and wake up with a shudder to the miserable reality.

Enough of the fever lingered yet to tinge with hectic the cheeks of her white face, and to heat her trembling hands. But for one thought Adela would not have cared whether she died or lived-at least, she told herself so in her mind's misery; and that thought was that, if she died, her husband might take another wife. A wife who would give him back what she herself had not given-love for love. Since Miss Upton, perhaps unwittingly, had breathed that suggestion, it had not left Adela night or day.

How bitterly she regretted the past none knew, or ever would know. During these weeks of illness, before the fever and since, she had leisure, and to spare, to dwell upon her conduct in it; to repent of it; to pray to Heaven for pardon for it. The approach of possible death, the stinging presence of hopeless misery, had brought Adela to that Refuge which she had never sought or found before, an ever-merciful God. Never again, even were it possible that she should once more mingle with the world, could she be the frivolous, heartless, unchristian woman she had been-not to speak of graver sins. Nothing in a small way had ever surprised Lady Harriet so much, as to find Adela get out her Bible and Prayerbook and keep them near her.

She sat to day, buried as usual in the past, the bitter anguish its remembrance always brought her rending her soul. We are told in holy writ that the heart of man is deceitful and desperately wicked. The heart of woman is undoubtedly contradictory. When Adela was Mr. Grubb's wife she had done her best to scorn and despise him, to persuade herself she hated him now that he was lost to her for ever, she had grown to love him, passionately as ever man was loved by woman. The very fact that relations between them could never be renewed but fostered this love. For Lady Adela knew better than to deceive herself with vain hopes; she knew that to cherish them would be the veriest mockery, that when Francis Grubb threw her off, it was for ever.

Many a moment did she spend now regretting that she had not died in the fever. It would at least have brought about a last interview; for Harriet would have kept her word and sent for him.

"Better for me to die than live," she murmured to herself, lifting her fevered hand. "I could have died happily with his forgiving kisses on my lips. Whereas to live is nothing but pain; wearinessand who knows how many years my life will last?"

Davvy came in ; a tumbler in her hand containing an egg beaten up with wine and milk. Davvy did not choose to abandon her mistress in her sickness and misfortunes, but Davvy considered

herself the most ill-used lady's maid that fate could produce. Buried alive in this dismal, bleak place in a foreign country, where the companions with whom she consorted, the other domestics, spoke a language that was barbarous and unintelligible, Davvy wondered when it would end.

"I don't want it," said Adela, turning from the glass and from Davvy.

"But Lady Harriet says you must take it, my lady. She put the wine in herself, and bade me run up with it while it was warm. You'll never get your strength up, my lady, if you refuse nourishment."

"I don't care to get my strength up. If you'd bring me some wine and water, Davvy, instead, I could drink that. Or some teaor lemonade. I am very thirsty."

"And what good is there in tea or lemonade?" returned Davvy, who ventured to contend now as she never had when her lady was in health, coaxing her also sometimes as if she were a child. "Lady Harriet said if you would not take this from me, my lady, she should have to come herself. And she does not want to come; she's busy." To hear that Harriet was busy seemed something new. "What is she busy over?" languidly asked Adela.

"Talking," answered Davvy. "Some English traveller has turned out of his way to call on her and Sir Sandy, my lady, and he is giving them all the home news."

"Oh," was the indifferent comment of Lady Adela. Home news was nothing to her now. And, to put an end to Davvy's importunity, she drank the refreshment without further objection.

Margery Upton had died and was buried: and her will, when it became known, created a nine days' wonder in London. Amidst those assembled to hear its reading, the mourners, who had just returned from the churchyard, none was more utterly astonished than Mr. Grubb. Never in his whole life had such an idea-that he would be the inheritor of Court Netherleigh-occurred to him. Miss Upton's statement of why it was left to him, as explained by her by word of mouth to Mr. Cleveland, was read out after the will; and Francis Grubb found a private letter, written by her to himself, put into his hand.

Lord Acorn was similarly astonished. Intensely so. Unpleasantly so. Though, in his débonnaire manner, he carried it off with easy indifference, not letting his mortification appear. Perhaps he had not in his heart felt so sure of Court Netherleigh as he had allowed the world to think: Miss Upton's warnings might not have been quite lost upon him. Failing himself, he would rather Francis Grubb had it than anyone; there might be no trouble about those over-due bonds; though Lord Acorn, always sanguine, had not allowed himself to dream of such a catastrophe as this.