his majority when the girl arrived at her father’s house. Mrs. Meredith’s perpetual occupation with these boys, her happiness in their holiday times, her melancholy when they went to school, had kept her friends interested for a number of years. Men who breathed sighs of relief when the terrible period of the holidays came to an end, and their own schoolboys were got rid of, put on soft looks of pity when they heard that Oswald and Edward were gone too; and mothers who were themselves too thankful that no drownings or shootings, not even a broken collar-bone or a sprained ankle, had marked the blissful vacations in their own house, half cried with Mrs. Meredith over the silence of hers ‘when the boys were away.’ They came and carried her off to family dinners, and made little parties to keep her from feeling it; as if there had been no boys in the world but those two. ‘For you know her circumstances are so peculiar,’ her friends said. The peculiarity of her circumstances consisted in this, that, though she had lived alone for these fifteen years in the Square, she was not a widow--neither was she a separated or in any way blameable wife. All that could be said was that the circumstances were very peculiar. She who was so sweet, whom everybody liked, did not somehow ‘get on’ with her husband. ‘’Abody likes me but my man,’ said a Scotch fisherwoman in a similar position. Mrs. Meredith did not commit herself even to so terse a description. She said nothing at all about it. Mr. Meredith was in India--though whether he had always been there, or had judiciously retired to that wide place, in consequence of his inability to get on with the most universally-liked of women, it was not generally known. But there he was. He had been known to come home twice within the fifteen years, and had paid a visit at the Square among other visits he had paid--and his wife’s friends had found no particular objections to him. But he had gone back again, and she had remained, placidly living her independent life. She was well off. Her boys were at Harrow first, and then at the University, where Edward still was disporting himself; though he had just got through his examination for the Indian Civil Service, and had more practical work in prospect. Oswald, who had ended his career at Oxford, was living at home; but even the grown-up son in the house had not removed any of her popularity. She had a perpetual levée every afternoon. Not a morning passed that two or three ladies did not rush in, in the sacred hours before luncheon, when nobody is out, to tell her or ask her about something; and the husbands would drop in on their way from business, from their offices or clubs, just for ten minutes before they went home. This was how her life was spent--and though sometimes she would speak of that life despondently, as one passed under a perpetual shadow, yet, in fact, it was a very pleasant, entertaining, genial life. To be sure, had she been passionately attached to the