for the interruptions of illness to which she was subject, for her tremblings and nervous terrors, in short, for being a woman and his wife. Their life together had contained scarcely an element of beauty or happiness of any kind. She had remained with him by force of circumstances, because it had never occurred to her as possible that she could do anything else. In these days people did not think of obtaining relief from the special burdens of their lives, or of throwing them off. A woman who had a bad or unkind husband endured him, as she would in all likelihood have endured a constitutional ailment, as a thing to be concealed from others as much as possible and made the best of, without seeking after doctors or medicines. It was a cross which had been put upon her to bear. She had happened badly in the lottery of life, drawn a bad number, an unhappy lot; but now there was nothing for it but to lie upon the bed that had been made for her, and to cut her coat according to her cloth. And thus life had gone on for five-and-thirty years. The number of miseries that can be borne in that time is incalculable, as wonderful as the tenacity with which human nature can support them, and rise every morning to a consciousness of them, yet go on all the same, scarcely less vigorous, in some cases more vigorous, than those to whom existence is happiness. No one in the White House was happy after the age of childhood, but nobody minded much except the mother, who had this additional burden to bear that the expectation of at least some future happiness in her children, never died out of her. Perhaps being no wiser than her neighbours she missed some legitimate if humble happiness, which she might have had, by not understanding how much real strength and support might have been found in the stout and homely affection of her eldest daughter, who was not in the least like her, and did not understand her, nor flatter her with any sympathy, yet who stood steadfastly by her and shielded her, and furthered her wishes when they could be divined, with a friendly, half compassionate, sometimes impatient support. But Joan had been critical from her very cradle, always conscious of the “fuss” which her mother only became conscious of making when she saw it in the half-mocking question in her children’s eyes. No, Mrs. Joscelyn would have said to herself, Joan was a good girl--though it seemed a misnomer to call her a girl, so mature as she was, in some indefinable way older than her mother--a good girl; but not one that was like her, or understood her, or knew what she meant. Perhaps Harry might, if she could get any good of him, if she did not always live in terror of a deadly quarrel between him and his father which would drive her last boy from the house; and Liddy, little Liddy would--no doubt Liddy would when she came back from her school. But all her other children had been Joscelyns, not one of them like her. She was