would be got over; but more frequently
planning how soon she could get Margaret
away from "that horrid place," and back
into the pleasant comforts of Harley Street.

"Oh dear!" said she to her maid; "look
at those chimneys! My poor sister Hale!
I don't think I could have rested at Naples,
if I had known what it was! I must have
come and fetched her and Margaret away."
And to herself she acknowledged that she
had always thought her brother-in-law rather
a weak man, but never so weak as now, when
she saw for what a place he had exchanged
the lovely Helstone home.

Margaret had remained in the same state;
white, motionless, speechless, tearless. They
had told her that her aunt Shaw was
coming; but she had not expressed either
surprise, or pleasure, or dislike to the idea.
Mr. Bell, whose appetite had returned, and
who appreciated Dixon's endeavours to gratify
it, in vain urged upon her to taste some
sweetbreads stewed with oysters; she shook
her head with the same quiet obstinacy as on
the previous day; and he was obliged to console
himself for her rejection by eating them
all himself. But Margaret was the first to
hear the stopping of the cab that brought her
aunt from the railway station. Her eyelids
quivered, her lips coloured and trembled,
Mr. Bell went down to meet Mrs. Shaw; and
when they came up, Margaret was standing,
trying to steady her dizzy self; and when
she saw her aunt, she went forward to the
arms open to receive her, and first found the
passionate relief of tears on her aunt's
shoulder. All thoughts of quiet habitual
love, of tenderness for years, of relationship
to the dead, all that inexplicable likeness in
look, tone and gesture, that seem to belong to
one family, and which reminded Margaret so
forcibly at this moment of her mother,-
came in to melt and soften her numbed
heart into the overflow of warm tears.

Mr. Bell stole out of the room, and went
down into the study, where he ordered a fire,
and tried to divert his thoughts by taking
down and examining the different books.
Each volume brought a remembrance or a
suggestion of his dead friend. It might be a
change of employment from his two days'
work of watching Margaret, but it was no
change of thought. He was glad to catch
the sound of Mr. Thornton's voice, making
enquiry at the door. Dixon was rather cavalierly
dismissing him; for with the appearance
of Mrs. Shaw's maid, came visions of former
grandeur, of the Beresford blood, of the
"station" (so she was pleased to term it)
from which her young lady had been ousted,
and to which she was now, please God to be
restored. These visions, which she had been
dwelling on with complacency in her conversation
with Mrs. Shaw's maid (skilfully
eliciting meanwhile all the circumstances of
state and consequence connected with the
Harley Street establishment, for the edification
of the listening Martha), made Dixon
rather inclined to be supercilious in her
treatment 'of any inhabitant of Milton; so,
though she always stood rather in awe of
Mr. Thornton, she was as curt as she durst
be in telling him that he could see none of
the inmates of that house that night. It was
rather uncomfortable to be contradicted in
her statement by Mr. Bell's opening the
study-door, and calling out:

"Thornton! is that you? Come in for a
minute or two; I want to speak to you." So
Mr. Thornton went into the study, and Dixon
had to retreat into the kitchen, and reinstate
herself in her own esteem by a prodigious
story of Sir John Beresford's coach and six,
when he was high sheriff.

"I don't know what I wanted to say to
you, after all. Only it's dull enough to sit
in a room where everything speaks to you of
a dead friend. Yet Margaret and her aunt
must have the drawing-room to themselves!"

"Is Mrs.- is her aunt come?" asked Mr.
Thornton.

"Come? Yes! maid and all. One might
have thought she could have come by herself
at such a time! And now I shall have to
turn out and find my way to the Clarendon."

"You must not go to the Clarendon. We
have five or six empty bed-rooms at home."

"Well aired?"

"I think you may trust rny mother."

"Then I'll only run up-stairs and wish
that wan girl good-night, and make my bow
to her aunt, and go off with you straight."

Mr. Bell was some time up-stairs. Mr.
Thornton began to think it long, for he was
full of business, and had hardly been able to
spare the time for running up to Crampton,
and enquiring how Miss Hale was.

When they had set out upon their walk,
Mr. Bell said:

"I was kept by those women in the
drawing-room. Mrs. Shaw is anxious to get
home- on account of her daughter, she says
- and wants Margaret to go off with her at
once. Now she is no more fit for travelling
than I am for flying. Besides, she says, and
very justly, that she has friends she must
see- that she must wish good-bye to several
people; and then her aunt worried her about
old claims, and was she forgetful of old
friends? And she said, with a great burst of
crying, she should be glad enough to go from
a place where she had suffered so much.
Now I must return to Oxford to-morrow,
and I don't know on which side of the scale
to throw in my voice."

He paused, as if asking a question; but he
received no answer from his companion, the
echo of whose thoughts kept repeating-

"Where she had suffered so much." Alas!
and that was the way in which this eighteen,
months in Milton to him so unspeakably
precious, down to its very bitterness, which
was worth all the rest of life's sweetness
would be remembered. Neither loss of father,