Perhaps the most unwelcome minor item in the affair to Lord Acorn, was having to carry the news to his wife at home. It was evening when he got there; he and Mr. Grubb having travelled up together: for the easy-natured peer did not intend to turn the cold shoulder to his son-in-law because he had supplanted him.

"Will you give me a bit of dinner, Frank?" asked the Earl, as they got into a cab together at the terminus, only too willing to put off the evil quart d'heure with my lady as long as might be.

"I will give it you, and welcome, if there is any to give," smiled Mr. Grubb. "I left no orders for dinner to-day, not knowing when I should be back."

Alighting in Grosvenor Square, they found some dinner was to be had. Afterwards, Lord Acorn went home. His wife, attired in one of Mme. Damereau's best black silk gowns, garnished with a crape apron, was sitting in the small drawing-room, all impatience.

Well, you are late!" cried she. "What can have kept you until

now?"

"It is only ten o'clock," replied the Earl, drawing a chair to the fire. "At work, Gracie!" he added, turning to his daughter, who sat at the table, busy with her tatting.

Only ten o'clock !" snapped the Countess.

"I expected you at five or six. And now-how are things left? I suppose we have Court Netherleigh ?"

"Well, no; we have not," quietly replied Lord Acorn.

"Not!"

"Not at all. Grubb is made the heir. He has Court Netherleigh -and is to take the name."

Lady Acorn's face, in its petrified astonishment, its righteous indignation, would have made a model for Sir David Wilkie. Not for a couple of minutes did she speak; voice and words alike failed her.

"The deceitful wretch!" broke from her at length. "To play the sneak with Margery in that way!"

"Don't waste your breath over a mistake, Betsy. Grubb knew nothing about it; is more surprised than you are. Court Netherleigh was willed to him when Margery first came into it; when he was a young lad. She but carried out the directions of Sir Francis Nether

leigh."

Lady Acorn was beginning to breathe again. But she was not the less angry.

"I don't care. It is no better than a swindle. How deceitful Margery must have been!”

"She kept counsel-if you mean that. As to being deceitful—no, I don't see it. She never did, or would, admit that the estate would come to us; discouraged the idea, in fact."

"All the same, it is a frightful blow. We were reckoning on it. Was nobody in her confidence?"

"Nobody whatever, save the old lawyer, Pincot. Two or three weeks before she died she disclosed all to Cleveland in a confidential interview. As it is not ourselves, I am heartily glad it's Grubb."

"What has she done with all her accumulated money?" tartly went on her ladyship. "She must have saved a heap of it, living in the inexpensive way she did!"

"Yes, there is a pretty good lot of that," equably replied the Earl. "It is left to one and another; legacies here, legacies there. I don't come in for one."

"No! What a shame!"

"You do, though," resumed Lord Acorn, stretching out his boots to the warmth of the fire. "You get ten thousand pounds." Countess as a very sop in the pan. Her

The words were to the

fiery face became a little calmer.

"Is it so?" she asked.

"Quite so," nodded the Earl.

"You don't get it in a lump,

though, without conditions. Only the interest for life; the sum itself then goes to Grace, here. I congratulate you, Gracie, my

dear."

Grace let fall her shuttle; her colour rose. "Oh, papa! Andand-what do my sisters have?" she added, ever, in her unselfishness, thinking of others.

"Mary, Harriet, and Frances get a thousand pounds each; Sarah and Adela only some trinkets as a remembrance. I suppose Margery thought they were well married and did not require money."

“And, papa, who else comes in ?" asked Grace, glancing across at her mother, who sat beating her foot on the carpet.

"Who else? Let me see. Thomas Cleveland has two thousand pounds. And Mrs. Dalrymple, the elder, has a thousand. And several of Margery's servants are provided for. And-and I think that's about all I remember."

"The furniture at Court Netherleigh?" interrupted Lady Acorn. "Who takes that?"

"Grubb; he takes everything pertaining to the house and estate; everything that was Sir Francis Netherleigh's. He is left residuary legatee. Margery Upton has only willed away what was her own of right."

"As if he wanted it!" grumbled Lady Acorn, giving a twitch to her new apron.

"The less one needs things, the more one gets them, as it seems to me. The baronetcy is to be renewed in him, Betsy."

"The baronetcy! In him!"

"Sir Francis wished it. There will not be much delay in the matter, either. Margery Upton put things en train for it before she died."

Lady Acorn could only reply by a stare; and there ensued a pause.

"The idiot that little minx Adela has shown herself!" was her final comment. "Court Netherleigh, it seems, would have been

hers."

But the barest items of Grace wrote to Harriet to

The little minx Adela, wasting away with fever in her Swiss abode, knew nothing of all this, and cared less. news concerning it came to the MacIvors; say that Court Netherleigh had been willed to Mr. Grubb, not to her father, but in that first letter she gave no details. That much was told to Adela. She aroused herself sufficiently to ask who had Court Netherleigh, and was told that Margery Upton had left it to Mr. Grubb.

"I knew he was a great favourite of hers," was all the comment she made; and but for the sudden flush, Lady Harriet might have thought the news was perfectly indifferent to her: and she made no further allusion to it, then or afterwards.

But of the particulars, I say, Sir Sandy and Lady Harriet remained in ignorance, for Grace did not write again. Nobody else wrote. And their extreme surprise at Mr. Grubb's inheritance had become a thing of the past, when one day a traveller, recently from England, found out them and the old château. It was Captain Frederic Cust, brother to the John Cust who stuttered. The Custs and the Acorns had always been very intimate; the young Cust lads, there were six of them, and the Ladies Chenevix had played and quarrelled together as boys and girls. Captain Cust knew all about the Court Netherleigh inheritance, and supplied the information lacking, until then, to Sir Sandy and Lady Harriet MacIvor. No wonder Davvy had said that Lady Harriet was too busy to go up stairs: she was as fond of talking as her mother.

And so, the abuse they had been mutually lavishing upon Mr. Grubb in private for these two or three past weeks they found to be unmerited. He was the lucky inheritor, it is true, but through no complicity of his own.

"You might have known that," said Captain Cust, upon Lady Harriet's candidly avowing this. "Grubb is the most honourable man living; he would not do an underhand deed to be made king of England to-morrow. I am surprised you could think it of him for a moment, Harriet."

"You be quiet, Fred," she retorted. "It was not an unnatural thought. The best of men will stretch a point of conscience when such a property as Court Netherleigh is in question."

"Grubb would not. And he could have bought such a place any day, had he a mind to do it."

"And to take up the baronetcy! You are sure that is true?" "Sure and certain. And I wish him joy with all my heart! There's not one of nous autres in the social world but would welcome him into our order with drums and trumpets."

Lady Harriet laughed. "You are just the goose you used to be, Fred."

"No doubt," assented Captain Frederic. "Where's the use of being anything better in such a silly world as this? Your wife has always paid me compliments, MacIvor, since the time when we were in pinafores."

"Just as she does me," nodded little Sir Sandy. "And how is Mr. Grubb?—I liked him, too, Captain. Does he still keep up that great big establishment in Grosvenor Square, all for himself?"

"Yes. Why shouldn't he? He's rich enough to keep up ten such. By the way, he is a member of Parliament now-do you know it? They've returned him for Wheatshire.”

And thus the conversation continued. But we need not follow it. After Captain Cust left at night, for he stayed the day with them, Lady Harriet sat in silent thought, apparently weighing some matter in her mind.

"Sandy," she said at length, looking across at him, "I don't think I shall tell Adela anything about this-I mean that her husband is to take the baronetcy. It will be better not."

"Why?" asked Sir Sandy.

"It will bring her past folly home to her so severely. It might bring all the fever back again."

"As you please of course, dear.

But she did not seem to care at

all when told he had inherited Netherleigh."

"That's all you know about it, Sandy!" retorted Lady Harriet. "I saw all the light in her eyes and the flush in her cheeks. I tell you, sir, she is in love with her husband now, though she may never have been before, and it will try her too greatly, in her sick state. Her chief bone of contention in the old days was his name; that's removed now. And she has forfeited that lovely place, Court Netherleigh!"

"You know best, my dear. Perhaps it will be kinder not to tell her. But you will have to caution Davvy, and those about her this is news that will not rest in a nutshell. But," remarked Sir Sandy after a pause," with all deference to your superior judgment, Harriet, I do not think she can care much more for her husband now than she cared of yore."

"Listen, Sandy," was the whispered answer; "yesterday evening at dusk I went softly up to Adela's room, and peeped in to see whether she was dozing. She sat in the fire-light, her head bent over that little old photograph she has of Mr. Grubb. Suddenly she gave a yearning kind of cry, and began raining tears and kisses. upon it."

VOL. XXXII.

S

In a small "appartement" in the Champs Elysées, so small, indeed, that the whole of it could have almost been put into the big salon of the château in Switzerland, and in its little drawing-room, sat Lady Harriet MacIvor and M. le Docteur Féron. Lady Adela sat in it also; but she went for nobody now. It was a lovely April day; the sun shone in through the crimson draperies of the window, flowers were budding, the trees were already in their first fresh green.

M. le Docteur Féron and Lady Harriet were talking partly to, partly at Adela. Inert, listless, dispirited, she paid little or no attention to them, or to anything they might choose to say: life and its interests seemed to be no longer of moment to her.

When we saw her in January she was getting better from the low fever. But she did not get well. The fever did subside in a degree, but the weakness and the listlessness remained. Do what they would, Sir Sandy and his wife could not rouse her from her apathy. Sir Sandy tried reasoning and amusement; Lady Harriet alternately soothed and ridiculed; Davvy, even, ventured now and again on a good scold. It was all one.

That exposé the previous summer, when she was put away by her husband, seemed to have changed Adela's very nature. At first her mood was a resentful one; then it became repentant: that was succeeded by one of heart-sickening remorse. Remorse for her own line of conduct during the past years. With the low fever in Switzerland, she began to think of serious things. The awakening to the responsibilities that lie upon us all to remember and prepare for a future and better state—which awakening comes to us all sooner or later in a greater or a less degree-came to Lady Adela. She saw what her past life had been, all its mocking contempt for what was good, its supreme indifference, its intense selfishness. Night by night on her bended knees, amid sobs and bitter tears, she besought forgiveness of the Most High God. Her cheeks turned red with shame whenever she thought of her kind and good husband, and of how she had requited him. Lady Harriet was right, too, in her surmise that Adela had now grown to love her husband. How full of contradictions is this human heart of ours, experience shows us more greatly day by day. When she could have indulged that love, she threw it contemptuously from her; now that the time had gone by for it, it was growing into something like idolatry.

Adela did not get better; perhaps, with this distressed frame of mind, much improvement was not to be looked for. At length the MacIvors grew alarmed, and resolved to take her to Paris for change and for better advice. Adela, contrary to expectation, made no