anxiety, did not even appreciate this failure of the interest of the others in what was so great a matter to herself so much as her daughter did. “What do the boys say? What do they think we should do?” she asked Joan a hundred times. “What shall we do? Oh! Joan, what do they think we should do?” “They are not thinking anything about it, mother,” Joan said. “They are off to the stables, looking at that beast. They are more taken up with her than with Harry. An ill-conditioned brute! I wish, for my part, she was at the bottom of the sea; but set a horse before the men, and they think of nothing else--if all the brothers in the world were perishing before their eyes.” “Miss Joan,” said a voice behind her, “I am astonished to hear you say that; you whom I have always taken to be such an excellent judge of a horse yourself.” The two women turned upon the new-comer with mingled feelings, half angry that he had intruded upon them, half excited by a sudden wild hope that a stranger might have some new light to throw upon a subject which they had exhausted, for they could not hide their trouble from him. Mrs. Joscelyn could not speak without an overflow of tears, and even Joan’s eyes were red, and there was that look of irritation and vexation and impatience in her face which comes so naturally to a capable person suddenly set down before a painful difficulty which she can see no way in her experience of coping with. Selby looked at her with anxious eyes. Was she angry with him? but, if so, there was a sudden gleam of expectation in her face too, suddenly looking up at him, as if she had said within herself, “If help is possible it is here--” which gave him courage; and he hastened to explain with that look and tone of sympathy in which strangers so often excel those who ought to be the natural consolers. “I see I have come in at a wrong time,” he said. “I knocked, but I suppose you did not hear. I ought to go away, but I want to stay: for you are in trouble, and if I could be of any use to you----” “Mr. Selby is--a true well-wisher,” said Joan, looking with almost timidity at her mother. She was not given to blushing, but she blushed now all over her face and her throat, and made such an appeal with her eyes as those eyes had never made before. “It will be best to tell him,” she said: “he, maybe, could think of something; and what is the use of trying to hide it? it will soon be all over the country-side.” “Indeed I am a well-wisher,” he cried; “if I can do anything, I will do it with all my heart. If it’s about your brother Harry, I’ve heard something--” and he looked from Joan to Mrs. Joscelyn with eyes so full of sympathy that they felt the look as a sick man feels a cool hand laid upon his hot forehead.