in March at Darton's to find what a good sensible fellow he was growing. He can be nothing but an Erlekin after all, bodily; but it struck me he had all the shrewd sound common sense of the Burridges, and a dawning of a dash of the Desmonds.-Forgive all this light talk, but if you knew what a load Dr. Bell's opinion of my Queenie last night, confirmed and continued this morning, has lifted from my heart you would not wonder if your foolish eldest son feels halfintoxicated with joy and gratitude.-Your letter of reconciliation and kindness has seemed a crowning mercy: if you only could have seen my little Dulcibella! she would indeed have been a genuine Erle-Queen; tell poor old Andrew she lies with a bunch of the Banksia he sent me upon her breast-GOD rest her soul !

Queenie wants me—I must put in her photograph with her own four little children round her-two taken from her now, as well as our own longed-for darling.-Best love to the girls.

.

"I am, in all seriousness,

"Your repentant, dutiful, and affectionate son, "ARTHUR DESMOND ERLE."

There, take it to the post at once, Alice! 'Nurse wants you ?'. I'm master, not nurse, below stairs! Take it, and be off with you!" and he sprang past her in the passage and up the stairs to his wife.

Mr. Erle resisted his first impulse, and abiding wish, and did not return the cheque. "Let me do as I would be done by; and not deny him the satisfaction of, as he puts it, making what amends he can for past follies and misdoings, small debts his were after all compared with many another man's. I will go up and see him next Thursday; he shall go with me to Davies, and hear for himself what he now says of me, and we will go on to Stepney, and I will spend the night at Diana's, and take up Isa with me for the change. All this last week's sorrow has been too much for the poor child; she is too young for such gloom and anxiety, and yet I rejoice I did withstand her entreaties to go abroad with the Winstanleys. Except in personal attractiveness, and kindness of heart, never were two sisters more really different than my own dear wife and Gertrude Winstanley,—I was wrong to yield to her entreaties to take possession of those three young girls in spite of all the educational advantages of her offer. Yet no one, as she said, could so nearly take a mother's place to them, poor children."

So George only went up to Stepney on Monday to gratify his own longing to see his brother again, made bearer of a large hamper full of poultry, cakes, vegetables, fruits and flowers, only Dulcibella having the wit to make her gift five shillings for his cab-fare. Even Freda had not protested at Amabel's and Kathleen's folly; nor George made more than a wry face aside at luggage so little congruous with the one small neat portmanteau containing all his own luggage for the night,-if Isa's belongings-she having passively fallen in with her father's final wish that she should spend the whole week with Diana -had assumed tolerably large dimensions. George, too, had meant to sleep at his married sister's in Queen Anne's Gardens; but, after all, Arthur persuaded him to telegraph to the Hon. Mrs. Saville inability to come on to her till the morrow, in order to stay in Bromley Street and have, what he called, a “shake-down" in his study.

What a walk the two brothers had that hot June afternoon and evening to the cemetery;-what a long tramp back again, through dusty roads, and endless lines of houses! Then Arthur went up, till ten, to the sick room; and George had tea with Aunt Elizabeth, and the children, who called him "Uncle George" at once; and were nice well-behaved children, he thought. If Ludovick was rather too thin and pale and precocious, Awdrey was a real beauty.

What a talk the two brothers had in Aunt Elizabeth's front parlour that long June night; not to run any risk of disturbing the sick room, if beneath it. The mid-June midnight twilight was almost passing into dawn when each swung himself silently over the little dividing railing and passed on to his respective room.

George left early enough to call in Queen Anne's Gardens before going back to Brayscombe; and here found a much interested auditor of all he had seen and heard in the married sister whom he had not met since her wedding day except at Paddington Station the previous day when she had picked up Isabel.

"I have let Isa go to spend the day with the Dennys," Mrs. Saville said, "they wished it, and I much wanted to see you alone." "And I to apologise for my telegram; but as I knew you two sisters were to be alone last night, Saville still away—”

"Oh, don't apologise! I am so glad you stayed; I am longing to go down myself, but in such small rooms and with so much illness fear I am best away; and then of course George was far more vexed at that hasty foolish marriage than at Arthur's throwing up his profession.

Still he is really very ready to help him in any practicable way,—and we do hope he may be able to do something. His brother-in-law wants a secretary now; and if Mrs. Arthur Erle be only-not actually vulgar -only passable-"

"My dear Diana, how could any one of us think that however lonely Arthur felt-thrust out of what is still as much an earthly paradise in his eyes as in ours,—he would marry a vulgar woman!”. George forgot his sister was but repeating the opinion her own family had given her, and himself amongst them. "Remember she was all but penniless, and a widow with three children, there could be no attraction but real goodness and beauty,-I really believe she has both."

“I am very thankful you can say so," said the Hon. Mrs. Saville, simply, "and George always maintained that the marriage once being a fait accompli there was nothing to be done but to make the best of it :—we asked Arthur to lunch or dine with us any day this week-but he declined. Dear Arthur! how fond our mother was of him! how little she could have foreseen this sudden declension of her high-souled darling boy! and at one time, and surely till and after death he was deeply religious, I am sure

"I really think, in his own way, Arthur is deeply religious still," interrupted George curtly, although knowing his sister was speaking in simplicity and true sisterly concern.

'It is, at least, an original way," said Mrs. Saville, with her sweet smile, amused to find the brother whom she had last seen, it seemed to her, a boy, now grown into a man over whom her three years' seniority and two years' dignity of married estate, no longer gave her any empire.

"And a passing phase, I think," pursued George, "but I don't think he will proceed to priests' orders for years, if ever. We had a long talk last night-he-he feels deeply, really I am sure, that having put his hand to the plough and drawn back, he is not fit to teach others." "But the secretaryship to Lord Warrington would be the very thing-"

"Try him; it will please him that you and George should have thought so much of him."

"But why is your tone so dissentient ?"

Only from an impression I got hold of in our many talks yesterday: that he means to serve where he can as he can't where he would."

There was a pause. Diana sat in her pretty morning-room full of

all the costly modern high art ministrants to gratification of eye and taste which were as pleasant to her own soul as to Arthur's, and still more so to her husband's mere endurance of existence. Her fair slender hands played with the bunch of exquisite roses in the bosom of her dainty morning-gown; the sun glided through a side window, and glinted on her graceful head and faultlessly arranged hair; but her blue eyes and smooth brow were full of thought, and it was George who broke the silence to say,

"Do not repeat one word of my impression; perhaps I ought not to have spoken of it to any one, but you seem safe here, and apart from all the others. Arthur has a tender heart, and he will be pleased at your and Saville's thought of him. He took me to see his child's grave. Imagine, Diana, a bare gravel mound amid thousands of similar new mounds in a cemetery enclosure of acres; we took some of the Brayscombe flowers, but really to me it seemed a profanation to leave them there. And the whole look of the place cut Arthur to the heart I am sure, though all he said was, 'Cremation preferable, I should say, to burial in a modern necropolis for the million.' And I led him back to our former topic that he might not dwell on the difference between his little Dulcie's and our George's graves."

"I can mend that, perhaps,—I will drive down there this afternoon. And send me up a hamper of grass-sods from Brayscombe churchyard to be put upon the grave, terra santa, to every one of us Erles, is it not, Geordie ?" she unconsciously called him by the pet name of his youth. "I can arrange with the clerk or sexton to-day, and tell him they are coming."

"But I would not take Isa," said George, "that poor child is all out of gear somehow, and is too young to see such a repulsive side of death, three funerals going on within sight of us yesterday in first, second, and third class grounds respectively, no individual interest or sympathy felt by the readers of the services with any one of the mourners, I imagine. Sometimes one feels that the modern world is too full, as I heard—”

"No, I won't take Isa; indeed she is not coming back till dinner time; I thought being with young people would be better for her, and I wanted much to have this talk with you. I had thought so much of that little niece, I have so longed for a daughter myself," and she looked around her pretty gilded, but child-empty cage, with a strange wistful yearning on her face.

"But I don't think Saville will like your going those ten miles east alone, will he?"

'He is very indulgent and kind," said Diana, "he knows how differently our dear mother brought us up, and in what a far superior school than he himself was. But I will not go alone on any account if you think he might not like it,—but I do-do not wish to be cowardly-and your account of that great place-could you go with me, if I go at once?" she asked suddenly.

"Certainly," said George.

"I long to go to Bromley Street also,-would there be time?" "We will see; let us do our real business first."

When half-an-hour later George handed his sister into her carriage and pair, as much as this was possible with a waiting-man on either side of her, he found the back seat full of the pots of plants in flower that had been decorating her own rooms. When they left the cemetery, they had been planted on the grave with his or her own hands,the footman giving his mistress her gardening-basket containing trowel and gloves as they alighted. Perhaps George also pitied those geraniums and roses, but did not say so.

"And Bromley Street ?" she asked as they returned to the carriage. "We might go for ten minutes."

And they went. What Alice, what Mrs. Pflegging, what all the stray urchins in the quiet little street thought of Mrs. Saville and her grand equipage and men, we cannot say. George would not let her alight, for fear of possible infection; but Arthur came out and sat ten minutes beside her; and Aunt Elizabeth brought Ludovick and Awdrey to the window by her especial desire that she might at least just see them. And Arthur read the mother-hunger at her heart aright as she exchanged bright smiles and gestures with them, then turned and kissed him silently, as his dismissal, tears in her sweet blue eyes.

FRIEDESWIDE meanwhile had put by, for the present, all thought of the Girton scholarship as the primary object of her existence, even of her studies. She was devoting herself to the portrait of her father