going badly, and that she was helpless to interfere, to arrest the ruin which stared them in the face. And now to feel that she might stop that ruin, might even make up for all the losses of the past, and place her son in the position his father had lost, was a happiness beyond description, and gave new life and exhilaration to all her thoughts. This change, however, occasioned other changes, which marked the alteration from the old life to the new with difficulties and embarrassments which were inevitable. One of those, and the most important, has been already indicated. It concerned Geoff. The change in Geoff's existence was great. Into the morning-room, where his mother and he had constantly sat together, where he had his lessons, where all the corners were full of his toys, where his little life had been spent from morning till night in such a close and absorbing companionship as can only exist between a parent and an only child, there suddenly intruded things and thoughts with which Geoff had little to do. First came a large writing table, occupying the centre of the room, with all sorts of drawers full of papers, and so many letters and notes and account-books that Geoff looked with astonishment, mingled with awe and admiration, at the work which went on upon it. "Did you write all these?" he said to his mother, touching with a finger a pile of letters. He was proud of the achievement, without remembering that he had himself sat very forlorn all the morning, in the light of the great bow windows, with his lesson books, and had asked a great many questions, without more response than a smile and a "Presently, dear," from the mother who was generally so ready to meet and reply to every word he said. Geoff kept his place in the window, as he had always done, and after Lady Markland had got through her morning's work there would be an attempt at the lessons, which heretofore had been the pleasant occupation of the whole morning,--a delightful dialogue, in which the mind of the teacher was as much stimulated as that of the pupil, since Geoff conducted his own education by means of a multitude of questions, to which it was not always very easy to reply. Under the new _regime_, however, this long process was not possible, and the lessons had to be said in a summary manner which did not at all suit Geoff's way of thinking. He did not complain, but he was puzzled, turning it over in his mind with slow but progressive understanding. The big writing-table seemed typical to Geoff. It threw a deep shadow behind it, making the thick, light-coloured, much-worn carpet, on which he had trotted all his life, dark and gloomy, like the robbers' cave he had often found so much difficulty in inventing in the lightness of the room. He had a robbers' cave to his desire now in the dark, dark hole between the two lines of drawers; but it was dearly bought.