Whether, when the romance of girlhood was over, Mrs. Kelvin ever regretted that she had forgotten the obligations of caste in order to become the wife of a provincial lawyer, was a fact best known to herself; but if any such regret ever made itself felt at her heart, it never found expression at her lips. Her husband was fond of her, and never stinted her in any way, and her life, quiet though it was, was not without its consolations. It was surely better to have a husband and a home, and to be the recognized leader of middle-class Pembridge society, than to live and die in single blessedness, a wretched nobody, in her uncle's grand cold mansion at Wemley. Like a sensible woman, she made the best of her position. She had her little re-unions, her Tuesdays, when everybody that was worth knowing in Pembridge, met in the little drawing-room over her husband's office, and where her simple hospitalities were dispensed with a grace and refinement that would have done no discredit to Wemley itself. But all those things now belonged to the past. At the time we make Mrs. Kelvin's acquaintance she had seen her sixtieth birthday, and was a confirmed invalid. This home of the Kelvins for three generations was a substantially-built red-brick house that dated from the era of the second George. It was not in the Pembridge main street, but formed one of a dozen houses similar to itself in a short retired street that opened out of the busier thoroughfare. It was the kind of house that--if houses could do such things--you would naturally expect to shrink into its foundations with horror, if ever compelled to have for its next-door neighbour anything so vulgar as a shop. The massive front door, with its lion's head knocker, opened into a good-sized entrance-hall, at the far-end of which was a tiny glass-fronted den sacred to the use of Mr. Piper; from which coign of vantage that ingenuous youth could see everybody who came in or went out, could tell this person to wait or usher that one into his master's office, and answer all inquiries; and could furthermore refresh himself by keeping up a guerilla warfare of repartee and chaff with the clerks as they passed into or out of their office. On the left as you entered from the street was the door which opened into Matthew Kelvin's private office. On the right hand were, first, the door which opened into the clerk's office, and secondly, the door of a waiting-room. Beyond these was a door which opened on to a private staircase. The real entrance to the private part of the house was down a covered passage at the side. Such passages were by no means infrequent in Pembridge. Many of the best houses in the place opened, not from the street, but from these side entries. Behind the house was an extensive piece of garden ground, containing fruit trees and rustic seats, and any quantity of old-fashioned sweet-smelling flowers such as our grandfathers and grandmothers dearly loved, but which look so