those persons who take a hint easily. The silence of her three listeners was no check to the worthy lady's eloquence. She continued to descant on Rhoda's attractions, and graces, and good manners; she dropped hints of the excellent opportunities Rhoda now had of "settling in life," only that she was a little fastidious from long association with such refined persons as the Erringtons, and had turned the cold shoulder to several well-to-do wooers in her own rank of life; she related anecdotes of Rhoda's early devotion to herself and her son, until Violet McDougall muttered under her breath, in a paroxysm of nervous impatience, "One would think the woman was doing it on purpose!"

Meanwhile Algernon was talking to Rhoda more freely and confidentially than he had spoken to her for a long, long time. He was indulging in the luxury of playing victim before a spectator whose pity would certainly be admiring, not contemptuous. And, as he spoke, the old habit of appealing to Rhoda, and confiding in Rhoda, and taking Rhoda's sympathy for granted, resumed its power over him. There was no strain of tenderness in his words. He said not a syllable that his wife and all the world might not freely have listened to. He talked as a petted boy might talk to an idolising sister—with a mixture of boastfulness and repining, which he would have been ashamed to display to a man.

Rhoda listened with sorrowful interest. How could it be that Algernon should have to endure all these troubles and mortifications? He was so clever, so accomplished, so highly connected, had such great and powerful relations! It appeared natural enough that folks like Mrs. Thimbleby, and the Gladwishes, and even her brother Seth, should sometimes be pressed for money. She herself, although she had never known privation in her father's house, had, until within the last year or so, been accustomed to the most rigid economy—not to say parsimony—and it had never cost her a care. But that Algernon Errington should desire money for various purposes, and not be able to get it, seemed to her a very hard case.

But Algernon's note was not all of complaint. There were occasional intervals in which he spoke of the brightness of his prospects ultimately, when once he should have tided over his present difficulties and had got out of Whitford. And there were a few flourishes about his social successes in town last year. In the indulgence of his all-absorbing egotism, he seemed to forget that the girl beside him had ever been—or had ever had either expectation or right to be—anything more to him than the patient, admiring, sisterly, humble confidante on whom he had relied for praise and sympathy from the time of his earliest recollections, and who supplied him with the most delicious food for his vanity, because unmingled with any doubt of its genuineness. No thought of her feelings (save that they were kindly and admiring towards himself) crossed his mind whilst he talked to her, bending down his head and gesticulating slightly with his white, handsome hands.

But when his mother called to her, "Come, Rhoda, I think, we must be going; I heard the carriage at the gate, child. You and Algy have been having a famous long chat! Reminded you of old times, didn't it?"

When I say Algernon heard these words, a spark of manhood made his cheeks tingle and his tongue stammer as he said, "I—I'm afraid I must have been—boring you dreadfully, Rhoda?"

In truth he was surprised to find that he had spent the whole evening in talking to Rhoda about himself. He glanced quickly at his wife, but she was occupied with the Misses McDougall. So occupied was she that she hardly returned Mrs. Errington's "Good night," which negligence, however, little ruffled that lady's equanimity. But when Rhoda approached to take leave of Castalia, the latter moved aside so suddenly that the movement might almost be called a start, and facing round, came opposite to her own image in the mirror above the chimney-piece, with Rhoda's fair image looking over its shoulder.

For one second, perhaps—it could scarcely have been more—the smooth surface of the glass gave back the two women's faces: one youthful, lily-hued, innocently surprised, with chestnut eyebrows and shining chestnut curls, and tender rosy lips parted like those of a child; the other yellow, worn full of fretful creases, with glittering eager eyes, and a thin mouth set into a straight line, and yet over all the undefinable pathos of a suffering spirit; behind the two, Algernon looking into his wife's dark eyes and recognising something there that he had never seen in them before.

In no longer time than it would take for a breath to dim the mirror all these images were gone, and the cold shiny glass indifferently showed a confusion of cloaks and shoulders and the back of a huge bonnet crowning Mrs. Errington's majestic figure.

From that day forth Castalia gave herself up to a devouring jealousy of Rhoda. She spied her goings and comings; she watched her husband's face when the girl was spoken of; she opened the letters that she found in the pockets of his clothes; she lay in wait to surprise some proof, no matter what, of a tender feeling on his part for his old love. In a word, she pursued her own misery with more eagerness, vigilance, and unflagging singleness of purpose than most people devote to the attainment of any object whatsoever.