the midst of this stagnation, and in the absence of other exciting amusement or occupation, the condition of Mrs. Cuthbert's mind and spirits came to be rather constantly, and not over charitably, commented upon. Nobody (I think, indeed, that chattering people in such cases seldom do mean real mischief) intended to be ill-natured, or wished actually to injure the woman, whose altered looks ought to have secured their pity, and whose sole fault as regarded them lay in this, namely, that her house was no longer as before the pleasant rendezvous for the idle and the light-hearted, and that the delightful post-meridian "teas,"-meetings after "jolly runs," when tongues wagged with unchecked entrain (to say nothing of the Colonel's "little dinners," during which often impromptu entertainments, unexceptionable wines were freely given by a host in whose hospitality there was no alloy of interested motives), were apparently at an end for ever.

And slightly rankling in the breasts of the thoughtless young stone-throwers whose words. I have quoted, was the injudicious interference with their boasted freedom of action of which Mrs. Cuthbert had been guilty. What right had she to be so absurdly moral? She had always lots of men about her, and liked flirting

just as well as other people did. Besides, did not Jack (Jack, who was enjoying a short English country holiday, and whose youthful mind was well saturated with the lax morality which, during a year of Paris student life, had, through eyes and ears and understanding, permeated amongst the fibres of the lad's moral being,)—did not Jack say of the gentleman whose presence in the lane could not by any possibility have been accidental, that he was one of the bestlooking fellows he had ever seen-a viveur evidently, and just at the age when men, and such men especially, are the most certain to "command" the "success," to obtain which too many of them seem to consider as the only thing the world contains worth having?

And thus it was that Gertrude Cuthbert, all unconsciously, became the mark for arrowssped "more through want of thought," it is to be hoped, than "want of heart"-from the quivers of those who, in her unthinking good nature, she had treated almost as her equals. Little, however, would she have cared had the truth, that scandal had been busy with her name, been made known to her. Deeper far than such "light cause" as that-for "light" this woman would, strong in her wifely purity, and absorbed in the sad and ceaseless agitation in which her days

and nights were passed, have called it-lay the shame and the bitterness which had driven, as she thought, for ever the sunny brightness from her life, making it-chiefly by reason of wearing fears and uncertainties (trials which are sometimes harder to bear than the shocks of actual "blows")—a burden almost too heavy to be borne.

THE Cuthberts, even as Midlandshire had prognosticated, never returned to Maplehurst. They went, as had been announced, "abroad," and for many years wandered hither and thither without a settled home or resting-place. Less than a year after their migration a girl, whom they christened Evelyn, was born, and some eight years later, another infant, lukewarmly welcomed (in anticipation at least) by its parents, had to be, as Colonel Cuthbert phrased it, "made the best of." This undesired "little stranger" proved to be a boy, and was called after his father, Gerald.

The family, to the number of five, were, when next they make their appearance collectively before the reader, all, with the ex

ception of "the little fellow," what is called "grown up." Archie, the eldest, is twentythree, a captain in the Austrian service, and as handsome a young cavalry soldier as ever clicked his spurs in the dance, or trailed, with a pardonable boyish vanity his virgin sabre under the admiring eyes of beauty.

It had been Colonel Cuthbert's earnest wish. that Cecil also should find his interests and occupations outside the pale of his own country; but in this desire the lad's stronger will had effectually thwarted him. Cecil had from his early boyhood resolutely determined that whatever might be the case with Archie, he would not, "to please anybody, be made into❞—I quote the boy's words, which are expressive at least, if not refined-"a beastly foreigner." If Archie chose to give up being an Englishman, let him. He would know the difference one of these days, and wish that he also had set at nought, as he (Cecil) meant to do, the paternal wishes.

A yielding man by nature, and withal not being himself without certain prejudices in favour of his own country, and of the advantages likely to ensue to a young man through his habits and tastes being formed in the land of his birth, Colonel Cuthbert did not long hold