maintaining indeed that to be spoken of at all was proof sufficient of undesirable conduct; but she would never investigate a charge, preferring rather to accept it in its vile integrity than to soil her hands by attempting to unweave its dirty threads; hence she would be pitiless, repellent, but she would never make herself the focus of gossip. She was a human being if you will; a Christian in creed and name assuredly; but beyond and above all things she was a well-mannered well-conducted English lady, a person of spotless morals and exquisite propriety, in the presence of whom humanity must not be human, truth truthful, nor nature natural.

This was the wife for Edgar Harrowby as a country gentleman; the woman whom Mrs. Harrowby would have chosen out of thousands to be her daughter-in-law; whom his sisters would like; who would do credit to his name and position; and whom he himself would find as good for his purpose as any within the four seas.

For when Edgar married he would marry on social and rational grounds; he would not commit the mistake of fancying that he need love the woman as he had loved-some others. He would marry her, whoever she might be, because she would be of a good family and reasonable character, fairly handsome, unexceptionable in conduct, not tainted with hereditary disease nor disgraced by ragged relatives, having nothing to do with vice or poverty in the remotest link of her connections-a woman fit to be the keeper of his house, the bearer of his name, the mother of his children. But for love, passion, enthusiasm, sentimentEdgar thought all such emotional impedimenta as these not only superfluous but oftentimes disastrous in the grave campaign of matrimony.

It was for this marriage that Adelaide had saved herself. She believed that any woman can marry any man if she only wills to do so; and from the day when she was seventeen, and they had had a picnic at Dunaston, she had made up her mind to marry Edgar Harrowby. When he came home for good, unmarried and unengaged, she knew that she should succeed; and Edgar knew it too. He knew it so well after he had been at home about a week that if anything could have turned him against the wife carved out for him by circumstance and fitness, it would have been the almost fatal character of that fitness, as if fortune had not left him a choice in the matter.

"And what do you think of Adelaide?" asked Mrs. Harrowby one "You have seen day when her son said that he had been to the rectory. her twice now, what is your impression of her?"

"She is prettier than ever; improved I should say all through," was his answer.

Mrs. Harrowby smiled.

"She is a girl I like," she said. "She is so sensible and has such nice feeling about things."

"Yes," answered Edgar; "she is thoroughly well-bred."

"We have seen a great deal of her of late years," Mrs. Harrowby

continued, angling dexterously. "She and the girls are fast friends, especially she and Josephine; though there is certainly some slight difference of age between them. But Adelaide prefers their society to that of any one about the neighbourhood. And I think that of itself shows such good taste and nice feeling!"

"So it does," said Edgar with dutiful assent, not exactly seeing for himself what constituted Adelaide's good taste and nice feeling in this preference for his dull and doleful sisters over the brighter companionship of the Fairbairns say, or any other of the local nymphs. To him those elderly maiden Harrowbys were rather bores than otherwise, but he was not displeased that Adelaide Birkett thought differently. If it "ever came to anything" it would be better that they satisfied her than that she should find them uncongenial.

"She is coming up to dinner this evening," Mrs. Harrowby went on to say; and Edgar smiled, pulled his moustaches, and looked halfpuzzled if wholly pleased.

"She is a pretty girl," he said, with the imbecility of a man who ought to speak and who has nothing to say; also who has something that he does not wish to say.

"She is better than pretty, she is good," returned Mrs. Harrowby; and Edgar, not caring to discuss Adelaide on closer ground with his mother, strolled away into his private room, where he sat before the fire smoking, meditating on his life in the past and his prospects in the future, and wondering how he would like it when he had finally abjured the freedom of bachelorhood and had taken up with matrimony and squiredom for the remainder of his natural life.

Punctually at seven Adelaide Birkett appeared. This too was one of her minor virtues: she was exact; mind, person, habits, all were regulated with the nicest method, and she knew as little of hurry as of delay and as little of both as of passion.

"You are such a dear good punctual girl!" said Josephine affectionately-Josephine whose virtues had a few more loose ends and knots untied than had her friend's.

"It is so vulgar to be unpunctual," said Adelaide with her calm good-breeding. "It seems to me only another form of uncleanliness and disorder."

"And Edgar is so punctual too!" cried Josephine by way of commentary.

Adelaide smiled, not broadly, not hilariously, only to the exact shade demanded by conversational sympathy.

"Then we shall agree in this," she said quietly.

"Oh I am sure you will agree, and in more than this;" Josephine returned, almost with enthusiasm.

Had she not been the willing nurse of this affair from the beginning? -if not the open confidante yet secretly holding the key to her younger friend's mind and actions? and was she not, like all the kindly disap

pointed, intensely sympathetic with love matters whether wise or foolish, hopeful or hopeless?

"Who is it that you are sure will agree with Miss Adelaide? if any one indeed could be found to disagree with her!" asked Edgar, standing

in the doorway.

Josephine laughed with the silliness of a weak woman "caught." She looked at Adelaide slily. Adelaide turned her quiet face unflushed, unruffled, and neither laughed sillily nor looked slily.

"She was praising me for punctuality; and then she said that you were punctual too," she explained cheerfully.

"We learn that in the army," said Edgar.

"But I have had to learn it without the army," she answered.

"Which shows that you have by the grace of nature what I have attained only by discipline and art," said Edgar gallantly.

Adelaide smiled. She did not disdain the compliment. On the contrary, she wished to impress it on Edgar that she accepted his praises because they were her due. She knew that the world takes us if not quite at our own valuation yet as being the character we assume tò be. It all depends on our choice of a mask, and to what ideal self we dress. If we are clever and dress in keeping, without showing chinks or discrepancies, no one will find out that it is only a mask; and those of us are most successful in gaining the good will of our fellows who understand this principle the most clearly and act on it the most consistently.

The evening was a pleasant one for Adelaide, being an earnest of the future for which, if she had not worked hard, she had controlled much. Edgar sang solos to her accompaniment, and put in his rich barytone to her pure, if feeble, soprano; he played chess with her for an hour, and praised her play, as it deserved; naturally, not thinking it necessary to make love to his sisters, he paid her almost exclusive attention, and looked the admiration he felt. She really was a very pretty young woman, and she had unexceptionable manners; and having cut himself adrift from his ties and handsomely released himself from his obligations, he was not disposed to take much trouble in looking far afield for a wife when here was one ready made to his hand. Still, he was not so rash as to commit himself too soon. Fine play is never precipitate; and even the most lordly lover, if an English gentleman, thinks it seemly to pretend to woo the woman whom he means to take, and who he knows will yield.

And on her side Adelaide was too well-bred for the one part, and too wise for the other, to clutch prematurely at the prize she had willed should be hers. Her actions must be like her gestures, graceful, rhythmic, rather slow than hurried, and bearing the stamp of purpose and deliberation. When Edgar should make his offer, as she knew he would, she would ask for time to reflect and make up her mind. This would be doing the thing properly, and with due regard to her own dignity; for

no husband of hers should ever have cause to think that she held her marriage with him as a thing so undeniably advantageous there was no doubt of her acceptance from the first. Every woman must make herself difficult, thought Adelaide, if she wishes to be prized; even the woman who for seven years has fixed her eyes steadily on one point, and has determined that she will finally capture a certain man and land him as her lifelong possession.

Thus the evening passed, with a subtle undercurrent of concealed resolves flowing beneath its surface admiration that gave it a peculiar charm to the two people principally concerned-the one feeling that she had advanced her game by an important move, the other that the eternal fitness of things was making itself more and more evident, and that it was manifest to all his senses whom Providence has destined for his wife, and for what ultimate matrimonial end he had been shaped and spared.

A book of photographs was on the table.

66 Are you here?" asked Edgar, lowering his bright blue eyes on Adelaide as she sat on a small chair at Mrs. Harrowby's feet, carrying daughterly incense to that withered shrine.

"Yes, I think so," she answered.

He turned the pages carefully, passing over his sisters in wide crinolines and spoon bonnets; his mother, photographed from an old picture, in a low dress and long dropping bands of hair, like a mouflon's ears, about her face; Fred and himself, both as boys in Scotch suits, set stiffly against the table like dolls; with gradual improvement in art and style, till he came to a page where Adelaide's fair vignetted head of large size was placed side by side with another, also vignetted and also large.

"Ah! there you are; and what a capital likeness!" cried Edgar, with the joyous look and accent of one meeting an old friend, giving that gauge of interest which we all unconsciously give when we first see the photograph of a well-known face. He looked at the portrait long and critically. "Only not so pretty," he added gallantly. "Those fellows cannot catch the spirit; they give only the outside forms, and not always these correctly. Here is a striking face," he continued, pointing to Adelaide's companion-picture-a girl with masses of dark hair, dark eycs, large, mournful, heavily fringed with long lashes, and a grave, sad face, that seemed listening rather than looking. "Who is she? She looks foreign."

Adelaide glanced at the page, as if she did not know it by heart. "That? Oh! that is only Leam Dundas," she said with the faintest, finest, flavour of scorn in her voice.

"Leam Dundas?" repeated Edgar; "the daughter of that awful woman?"

"Yes, and nearly as odd as the mother," answered Adelaide, still in the same cold manner and with the same accent of superior scorn.

"At least she used to be, you mean, dear, but she is more like other people now," said kindly Josephine, more just than politic.

Adelaide looked at her calmly indifferently.

"Yes, I suppose she is rather less savage than of old," was her reply; "but I do not see much of her."

"I do not remember to have ever seen her; she must have been a mere child when I was here last," said Edgar.

"She is nineteen now, I think," said Mrs. Harrowby.

"Not more?" repeated Adelaide. "I imagined she was one and twenty at the least. She looks so very much older than even this-five or six and twenty full;-dark people age so quickly."

"She seems to be superbly handsome," Edgar said, still looking at the portrait.

"For those who like that swarthy kind of beauty. For myself I do not; it always reminds me of negroes and Lascars.”

Adelaide leaned forward, and made pretence to examine Leam's portrait with critical independence of judgment. She spoke as if this was the first time she had seen it, and her words the thought of the moment resulting.

"There is no negroid taint here," Edgar answered, gravely. "It is the face of a sibyl, of a tragedian."

"Do you think so? It is fine in outline certainly, but too monotonous to please me, and too lugubrious; and the funny part of it is, there is nothing in her. She looks like a sibyl, but she is the most profoundly stupid person you can imagine."

"Not now, Addy; she has wakened up a good deal," again interposed Josephine with her love of justice and want of tact.

"But do you not see the mother in her, Josephine? I do, painfully; and the mother was such a horror! Leam is just like her. She will grow her exact counterpart."

"A bad model enough," said Edgar; "but this face is not bad. It has more in it than poor old Pepita's. How fat she was!"

"So will Leam be when she is as old,” said Adelaide, quietly. “And

do you think these dark people ever look clean? I don't."

"That is a drawback certainly," laughed Edgar, running through the remainder of the book.

But he turned back again to the page which held Leam and Adelaide side by side, and he spoke of the latter while he looked at the former. The face of Leam Dundas, mournful, passionate, concentrated as it was, had struck his imagination; struck it as none other had done since the time when he had met that grand and graceful woman wandering, lost in a fog, in St. James's Park, and had protected from possible annoyance till he had landed her in St. John's Wood. He was glad that Leam Dundas lived in North Aston, and that he should see her without trouble or overt action; and as he handed Adelaide into her carriage he noticed for the first time that her blue eyes were not quite even, that her