watched the scene with bewildered surprise and terror. It is good when a child's ideal of married life is founded on that of her own father and mother. Richard Rebell was often impatient and irritable, but the little girl had never seen the shadow of anything resembling a dissension between her parents. What then did this mean, what did her mother's tears portend? But already Mrs. Rebell was making a determined effort to command herself. Her husband put his arm, not untenderly, round her shoulder, and, with his face set in stern lines, led her back to her seat. Then Barbara suddenly darted into the room, and flung herself on her mother, putting her slender arms round that dear mother's neck, and so making, all unconsciously, a welcome diversion. Mrs. Rebell even laughed a little. "Dear child—my little Barbara—you didn't know that grown-up people ever cried!"

But Barbara was already retreating to the balcony, and she heard her father say in a low voice, as if for the first time he realised that his words might be overheard: "I am sure you do not seriously contemplate our receiving Bar and—and Bosworth, together? The idea is monstrous! Whatever has come and gone, however degraded I may have become among my fellows, I still have the right to protect my wife from insult, and to expect her to obey me in such a matter as this."

But Mrs. Rebell clasped her hands together and looked up in the troubled face of the man opposite her with a look at once appealing and unsubmissive. "Richard!" she cried, "oh Richard! I always do obey you. When have you ever known me go against your wish, or even desire to do so?"

He shook his head impatiently, and she added urgently, "But in this one matter—oh, my dear love—pray try and look at it from my point of view! It is Barbara I wish to receive—Barbara who is of consequence to us. I know well all you would say," the speaker gave a sudden imperceptible look towards the open window, "but you would not put so cruel an affront on that noble, generous creature! Ah, yes, Richard, she is noble, she is generous."

"Her generosity shall cease to-morrow—nay, to-day," he said grimly.

"Do not say so!" she cried, starting up; and her little daughter, gazing fascinated, thought she had never till to-day seen her mother look really alive, alive as other women are. Mrs. Rebell had pushed her fair hair off her forehead, and her cheeks were red, her blue eyes bright, with excitement.

"Ah no, Richard, I was not thinking of that—not of such generosity as can be made to cease to-morrow or to-day; but of Barbara's long goodness to us both, nay, if you like to put it so, of her goodness to me, who am in no way related to her! Could any sister have been kinder than she has been? Were any of my own sisters as kind? True, we did not choose to avail ourselves of her hospitality."

"I think that now, even you, Adela, must see that I was right in that matter." Richard Rebell spoke rather drily.

"I never questioned it," she said, sharply; "you know, Richard, I never questioned your decision!"

There was a pause. The memories of both husband and wife were busy with the past, with an offer which had been made to them by Richard Rebell's kinswoman, the offer of a home in England, and of a chance, or so the wife had thought at the time, of ultimate rehabilitation for one whom many even then thought completely innocent of the charge brought against him.

Adela Rebell was a woman of high honesty, and so, "That is not quite true," she said reluctantly, "I did question your decision in my heart, and I see now that you were right. And yet perhaps, my dear, if we had been there——?"

Richard Rebell got up. He went and deliberately closed the window, making a temporary prisoner of the little girl: then he came back, and answered, very composedly, the meaning of the half-question which his wife's shrinking delicacy had prevented her putting into words. "Our being there, Adela, would not have made the slightest difference," he gave her a peculiar, not unkindly look, "for as a matter of fact I was then aware of what you apparently only began to suspect long after; and I think that you will admit that the state of things would have made our position at Chancton intolerable. We should very naturally have been expected to shut our eyes—to pander——"

"Yes—yes indeed!" his wife shrank back. "But you never told me this before——Why did you not tell me at the time?"

"My dear," he answered, very quietly, "that is not the sort of thing a man cares to tell, even his wife, when the heroine of the tale is his own cousin. And Barbara, as you have reminded me to-day, had behaved, and was behaving, very generously to us both."

"But if—if you felt like that, why——"

Mrs. Rebell looked up imploringly; she knew what this conversation meant in pain and retrospective anguish to them both. But again Richard Rebell answered, very patiently, his wife's unspoken question, "Well, I admit that I am perhaps illogical. But what happened two years ago, I mean the birth of Barbara's child—has made a difference to my feeling. I don't think"—he spoke questioningly as if to himself, "I hope to God I don't feel as I do owing to any ignoble disappointment?"

"No, no, indeed not!" There was an accent of eager protest in Adela Rebell's voice: "Besides, she wrote and said—she has said again and again—that it will make no difference."

"In any case," he spoke rather coldly, "Barbara Sampiero is certain to outlive me, and I do not think anything would make her unjust to our girl. But to return to what I was saying, and then, if you do not mind, Adela, we will not refer to the subject again——The birth of the child, I say, has altered my feeling, much as it seems to have done, from what I gather from Daman, that of the rest of the world."

"I always so disliked Mr. Daman," his wife said irrelevantly.

"No doubt, no doubt—I grant you that he's not a very nice fellow, but he's always been fond of her, and after all he has always stuck to us. There's no doubt as to what he says being the truth——"

"But Richard—is not that very unfair?" Mrs. Rebell spoke with a fire that surprised herself: "if, as you tell me now, you always knew the truth concerning Bar and Lord Bosworth, should what happened two years ago make such a difference?"

"Till two years ago,"—he spoke as if he had not heard her words,—"Barbara held her own completely; so much is quite clear, and that, mind you, with all the world, even including the strait-laced folk about Chancton. I suppose people were sorry for her—for them both, if it comes to that——Besides, it was nobody's business but their own. Now——" he hesitated: "Daman tells me that she's absolutely solitary, I mean of course as regards the women." He added musingly, as if to himself, "She's acted with extraordinary, with criminal folly over this matter."

"Then she is being treated as we should have been treated,—indeed as we were, by most people, during the short time we stayed in England eight years ago?"

"I do not think," Mr. Rebell spoke very coldly, "that your comparison, Adela, holds good. But now, to-day, the point is this: am I to be compelled to receive, and indeed to countenance, Barbara Sampiero and her lover? and further, am I to allow my wife to do so? Do you suppose"—he