crowding till it seemed as if there could never be room for so many to grow; but the weaker ones fell from the boughs or were blown away when the wind was fierce, so the Plum Tree felt no anxiety, knowing that it was built for a large family! The little green globes grew and grew, and drank in sweet mother-juices, and swelled, and when the summer sun touched their cheeks all day they flushed and reddened, till when August came the tree was laden with purpling fruit; fruit so tempting that its rosy beauty had sometimes to be hidden under a veil of grey fishing net, lest the myriad bird-friends it had made during the summer should love it too much for its own good.

So the Plum Tree grew and flourished, taking its part in the pageant of the seasons, 6 unaware that its existence was to be interwoven with that of men; or that creatures of another order of being were to owe some changes in their fortunes to its silent obedience to the motive of life.

The long, low drawing room of the Manor at Stoke Revel was the warmest and most genial room in the old Georgian house. It was four-windowed and faced south, and even on this morning of a chilly and backward spring, the tentative sunshine of April had contrived to put out the fire in the steel grate. One of the windows opened wide to the garden, and let in a scent which was less of flowers than of the promise of flowers––a scent of earth and green leaves, of the leafless daphne still a-bloom in the shrubbery, of hyacinths and daffodils and tulips and primroses still sheathed in their buds and awaiting a warmer air.

But this promise of spring borne into the room by the wandering breeze from the river, was nipped, as it were, by the frigid spirit of 8 age and formalism in its living occupants. Mrs. de Tracy, a lady of seventy-five, sat at her writing-table. Her companion, Miss Smeardon, a person of indeterminate age, nursed the lap-dog Rupert during such time as her employer was too deeply engaged to fulfil that agreeable duty. Mrs. de Tracy, as she wrote, was surrounded by countless photographs of her family and her wide connection, most prominent among them two––that of her husband, Admiral de Tracy, who had died many years ago, and that of her grandson, his successor, whose guardian she was, and whose minority she directed. Her eldest son, the father of this boy, who had died on his ship off the coast of Africa; his wife, dead too these many years; her other sons as well (she had borne four); their wives and children––grown men, fashionable women, beautiful children, fat babies: the likenesses of them all were around her, standing amid china and flowers and bric-a-brac on the crowded tables and what-nots of the not inharmonious 9 and yet shabby Victorian room. Mrs. de Tracy, it might at a glance be seen, was no innovator, either in furniture, in dress, or probably in ideas. As she was dressed now, in the severely simple black of a widow, so she had been dressed when she first mourned Admiral de Tracy. The muslin ends of her widow’s cap fell upon her shoulders, and its border rested on the hard lines of iron-grey hair which framed a face small, pale, aquiline in character and decidedly austere in expression.

She took one from a docketed pile of letters and held it up under her glasses, the sun suddenly striking a dazzle of blue and green from the diamond rings on her small, withered hands. Then she read it aloud to her companion in an even and chilly voice. She had read it before, in the same way, at the same hour, several times. The letter, couched in an epistolary style largely dependent upon underlining, appeared to contain, nevertheless, some matter of moment. It was dated 10 from Eaton Square, in London, some weeks before, and signed Maria Spalding. (“Her mother was a Gallup,” Mrs. de Tracy would say, if any one asked who Maria Spalding was; and this was considered sufficient, for Mrs. de Tracy’s maiden name had been Gallup,––not euphonious but nevertheless aristocratic.)

My dear Augusta (Maria Spalding wrote): I am going to ask you to help me out of a difficulty. There is no use beating about the bush. You know that Cynthia’s daughter Robinetta (Loring is her married name) has been with me for a month. American or no American, I meant to have had her for a part of the season, and to present her, if possible (so good for these Americans to learn what royalty is and to breathe the atmosphere which doth hedge a King as Shakespeare says, and which they can never have, of course, in a country like theirs). I know you can’t approve, dear Augusta, and 11 you will blame me for sentimentality––but I never can forget what a sweet creature Cynthia was before she ran away with that odious American––and my greatest friend in girlhood, too, you must remember. So Robinette, as she is generally called, has come to my house as a home, but a most unlucky thing has happened. I have had influenza so badly that it has affected my heart (an old trouble), I am ordered to Nauheim, and Robinette is stranded, poor dear. She has few friends in London and certainly none who can put her up. Tho’ she is a widow, she is only twenty-two (just imagine!), very pretty, and really, tho’ you won’t believe it, quite nice. I am desperate, and just wondering if you would let by-gones be by-gones, and receive her at Stoke Revel. She has set her heart upon seeing the place, and some picture she was called after (I can’t remember it, so it can’t be one of the famous Stoke Revel group––a copy, I fancy), and on paying a visit to Lizzie Prettyman, her mother’s old 12 nurse at Wittisham over the river. She promised her mother she would do this––and such a promise is sacred, don’t you think? It’s such an old story now, Cynthia’s American marriage, and no fault of Robinette’s, poor dear child. Her wish is almost a pious one, don’t you agree, to pay respect to her mother’s memory and the family, and is much to be encouraged in these days of radicalism, when every natural tie is loosened and people pay no more respect to their parents than if they hadn’t any, but had made themselves and brought themselves up from the beginning. So don’t you think it’s a good thing to encourage the right kind of feeling in Robinette, especially as she is an American, you know....

Mrs. de Tracy paused, and replaced the letter in the package from which she had withdrawn it.

“Maria Spalding’s point of view,” she observed, “has, I confess, helped me to overcome 13 the extreme reluctance I felt to receive the child of that American here. Cynthia de Tracy’s elopement nearly broke my dear husband’s heart. She was the apple of his eye before our marriage; so much younger than himself that she was like his child rather than his sister.”

“What a shock it must have been!” murmured the companion. “What ingratitude! Can you really receive her child? Of course you know best, Mrs. de Tracy; but it seems a risk.”

“Hardly a risk,” rejoined Mrs. de Tracy with dignity. “But it is a trial to me, and an effort that I scarcely feel called upon to make.”

Miss Smeardon was so well versed in her duties that she knew she always had to urge her