When Lily began her dressmaking in the Waterside village, her brother Abel had just attained the highest object of his ambition. He had become a fellow of his college, and thus was provided at once with the means of living, and with a position which was doubly dear to him, in that it supplied his greatest want, a recognised standing-ground and social rank, such as it is. Nothing could be more honourable to a man than thus to have gained, by his own exertions, a position so entirely satisfactory; but there were elements involved which made his success very different from that of most of his contemporaries. He did not announce it to his family, or indeed give them the least hint of this new step in life, with all the advantages it brought. This was not because he wanted to be unkind, or from any mean desire to keep his prosperity to himself. Could he have sent to them anonymously, without risk of inquiry, a share of his income, he would have been glad to do so; but he did not know how to resume his intercourse with them in his changed circumstances. What pleasure could there be in any meeting now, he asked himself? It seemed to him that any contact with the rude homely habits of his own class would be intolerable: all the more intolerable that he could not deceive himself on the subject, or deny that the honest, thrifty peasant folk were a credit to him, as he, were he as good as they, would be a credit to them. It must be allowed in his defence that a young University man of distinguished talents and prospects, to whom the best society in the country might be open, and who was already on intimate terms with many young great people and dawning notabilities, had need be of heroic strain to be capable of confessing that his mother was a woman who sold eggs and butter in the market. And Abel was not heroic. He was excitable, susceptible, nervous, and visionary, doing little credit, so far, to his mountain breeding. Perhaps it was because the fact of his dependence, and the extreme goodness of the patron who had done so much for him, had been unduly impressed upon his young mind, that he was so anxious now to conceal his origin entirely, and shrank from his family and kind with so much dread and horror. But it is more difficult to explain how, doing this, he should yet have accepted the invitation which young Charley Landale, a much humbler member of his college, pressed upon him eagerly yet timidly. The Landales were well known to Abel, though they knew him only as a great scholar and "rising man," of whose friendship their son was proud. They were gentry of Waterdale, and it was thus to his own district, the very parish in which he had been brought up, that he was invited to go. It was madness to do so; yet he did it with rash excitement in consciousness of the danger, and foolish hankering after his birthplace: a kind of loyalty in disloyalty, very strange and unusual. Though the idea that his parentage might be found out alarmed