appealing collections of wistful wondering single gentlewomen that a great calculating benevolence perhaps ever found arrayed before it--ornaments these all of the second and third cousinship and interested spectators of the almost inexpressible facts. I should have liked completely to express them, in spite of the difficulty--if not indeed just by reason of that; the difficulty of their consisting so much more of "character" than of "incident" (heaven save the artless opposition!) though this last element figured bravely enough too, thanks to some of the forms taken by our young Albert's wild wilfulness. He was so weak--after the most approved fashion of distressing young men of means--that his successive exhibitions of it had a fine high positive effect, such as would have served beautifully, act after act, for the descent of the curtain. The issue, however (differing in this from the common theatrical trick) depended less on who should die than on who should live; the younger of cousin Helen's pair of wards--putting them even only as vessels of her attempted earnestness--had violently broken away, but a remedy to this grief, for reasons too many to tell, dwelt in the possible duration, could it only not be arrested, of two other lives, one of these her own, the second the guileless Henry's. The single gentlewomen, to a remarkable number, whom she regarded and treated as nieces, though they were only daughters of cousins, were such objects of her tender solicitude that, she and Henry and Albert being alike childless, the delightful thing to think of was, on certain contingencies, the nieces' prospective wealth. There were contingencies of course--and they exactly produced the pity and terror. Her estate would go at her death to her nearest of kin, represented by her brother and nephew; it would be only of her savings--fortunately, with her kind eye on the gentlewomen, zealous and long continued--that she might dispose by will; and it was but a troubled comfort that, should he be living at the time of her death, the susceptible Henry would profit no less than the wanton Albert. Henry was at any cost to be kept in life that he _might_ profit; the woeful question, the question of delicacy, for a woman devoutly conscientious, was how could anyone else, how, above all, could fifteen other persons, be made to profit by his profiting? She had been as earnest a steward of her brother's fortune as if directness of pressure on him, in a sense favourable to her interests--that is to her sympathies, which were her only interests--had been a matter of course with her; whereas in fact she would have held it a crime, given his simplicity, to attempt in the least to guide his hand. If he didn't outlive his nephew--and he was older, though, as would appear, so much more virtuous--his inherited property, she being dead, would accrue to that unedifying person. _There_ was the pity; and as for the question of the disposition of