had met his stepfather but rarely, and had on each occasion increased the disfavour with which from the first the elder man had regarded him. He had never tried to propitiate, had, indeed, regarded him with contemptuous indifference, secure in what he fancied to be the security of his mother's position; and there had been covert antagonism between them from the first. How much astonished Mr. Carruthers would have been had any revelation been made to him of the secrets of his own heart, whereby he would have discovered that a strong sentiment of jealousy lay at the root of his antipathy to George Dallas--jealousy which intensified his hardness and sternness, and forbade him to listen to the promptings of common sense, which told him that the line he was taking towards the son was so cruel to the mother as to neutralize all the advantages presented by the fine marriage she had made, and for which, by the way, he expected her to be constantly demonstratively grateful. In this expectation he was as constantly disappointed. Mrs. Carruthers was an eminently _true_ woman, and as she felt no peculiar exuberance of gratitude, she showed none. She was a lady too--much more perfectly a lady than Mr. Carruthers was unimpeachably a gentleman--and, as such, she filled her position as a matter of course, as she would have filled one much higher, or one much lower, and thought nothing about it. She was of so much finer a texture, so much higher a nature, than her husband, that she did not suspect him of any double motive in his treatment of George Dallas. She never dreamed that Mr. Carruthers of Poynings was secretly uneasily jealous of the man who had died in his prime many years before, and the son, who had been first the young widow's sole consolation and then her bitterest trial. The living and the dead combined to displease Mr. Carruthers, and he would have been unequivocally glad, only in decorous secrecy, could he have obtained any evidence to prove that George Dallas was remarkably like his father in all the defective points of his personal appearance and in all the faults of his character. But such evidence was not within his reach, and Mr. Carruthers was reduced to hoping in his secret heart that his suppositions were correct on this point, and discovering a confirmation of them in his wife's scrupulous silence with regard to her first husband. She had never, in their most confidential moments, remarked on any likeness between George and his father; had never, indeed, mentioned Captain Dallas at all, which appeared extremely significant to Mr. Carruthers, but seeing that Captain Dallas had been dead twelve years when his widow became Mrs. Carruthers of Poynings, would not have occasioned much surprise to the world in general. Mr. Carruthers regarded himself as his wife's benefactor, but she did not partake of his views in that respect. The notion which he entertained of his position with regard to his niece Clare was better founded and