Christian had made hers, built her castle in Spain, and furnished and adorned it from basement to battlement, even when she was a girl of fourteen. Sitting night after night alone, listening for the father's footstep, and then trembling when she heard it, or hidden away up in her own bedroom, her sole refuge from the orgies that took place below, where the sound of music, exquisite music, went up like the cry of an angel imprisoned in a den of brutes, the girl had imagined it all. And through every vicissitude, hidden closer for its utter contrast to all the associations and experience of her daily life, Christian Oakley had kept in her heart its innocent, womanly ideal of home. Now, she had the reality. And what was it? Externally it looked _very_ bright. Peeping into that warm, crimson-tinted dining-room at the hour between dinner and tea, when the whole family at the lodge were sure to be assembled there, any body would say what a happy family it was, and what a pleasant picture it made. Father and mother at either end of the table; children on both sides of it; and the two elderly aunts seated comfortably in their two arm-chairs at the fireside, one knitting--_q. e. d._--, sleeping, the other-- No. Miss Gascoigne never slept. Her sharp, _"Flaw-seeking eyes, like needles' points,"_ were always open, and more especially when the circle consisted, as now, of her brother-in-law, his children, and his new wife. Doubtless she considered watchfulness her duty. Indeed, as she explained over and over again to Aunt Maria, the principal reason which made her consent still to remain at the Lodge, instead of returning to her own pretty cottage at Avonside, was to overlook and guard the interests of "those poor motherless children." Now it happened, unfortunately for Miss Gascoigne, that if Christian had one bright spot in the future of her married life to which she had looked forward earnestly, longingly, it was those children--how she would take care of them; fill up her weary days with them; love them, and be loved by them; in short, find in them the full satisfaction of her motherly heart--that heart in which she then thought there was no instincts or emotions left except the motherly. How she yearned and craved for this, God and her own soul only knew. Yet, how she hardly knew, but so it was, none of these hopes had been fulfilled. She saw almost nothing of the children save during the one hour after dinner, when she sat silently watching them, one on each side of their father, and one on his knee, all so happy together. Dr. Grey always looked happy when he was with his little folk. And they, their very faults faded off into sweetnesses when they came within the atmosphere of that good, loving, fatherly nature, for love makes love, and goodness creates goodness. Titia lost her prim conceit, Atty his selfish roughness, and Oliver became a perfect little angel of a child for at least one hour a day--the hour they spent with their father.