“How is the old Q.C. and his pretty grandchild? That quaint old room of theirs in the Temple somehow took my fancy, and the child was divine. Do you remember my showing you, in a gloomy narrow street here, a jolly old watchmaker who sits in his shop-window and is for ever bending over sick clocks and watches? Well, he’s still sitting there, as if he had never moved since we saw him that Saturday months ago. I mean to study him for a portrait; his sallow, clean-shaved, wrinkled face has a whole story in it. I believe he is married to a Xantippe who throws cold water over him, both literally and metaphorically; but he is a philosopher--I’ll stake my reputation as an observer on that--he just shrugs his sturdy old shoulders, and goes on mending clocks and watches. On dark days he works by a gas jet--and then Rembrandt would enjoy painting him. I look at him whenever my world is particularly awry, and find him highly beneficial. Davison has forwarded me to-day two letters from readers of ‘Lynwood.’ The first is from an irate female who takes me to task for the dangerous tendency of the story, and insists that I have drawn impossible circumstances and impossible characters. The second is from an old clergyman, who writes a pathetic letter of thanks, and tells me that it is almost word for word the story of a son of his who died five years ago. Query: shall I send the irate female the old man’s letter, and save myself the trouble of writing? But on the whole I think not; it would be pearls before swine. I will write to her myself. Glad to see you whenever you can run down. “Yours ever, “D. V.” (“Never struck me before what pious initials mine are.”) The very evening I received this letter I happened to be dining at the Probyn’s. As luck would have it, pretty Miss Freda was staying in the house, and she fell to my share. I always liked her, though of late I had felt rather angry with her for being carried away by the general storm of admiration and swept by it into an engagement with Lawrence Vaughan. She was a very pleasant, natural sort of talker, and she always treated me as an old friend. But she seemed to me, that night, a little less satisfied than usual with life. Perhaps it was merely the effect of the black lace dress which she wore, but I fancied her paler and thinner, and somehow she seemed all eyes. “Where is Lawrence now?” I asked, as we went down to the dining-room. “He is stationed at Dover,” she replied. “He was up here for a few hours yesterday; he came to say good-bye to me, for I am going to Bath next Monday with my father, who has been very rheumatic lately--and you know Bath is coming into fashion again, all the doctors recommend it.”