Somersetshire, and only paying his family a visit two or three times in a year! Thus the fault faded out of sight altogether by the crowding of the circumstances round it; and Frederick himself, in contemplating (for he was always serious) the providential way in which his life had been arranged for him in a new groove, forgot that the first step in this arrangement had been a very reprehensible one on his own part, and came to regard the “putting down” of the carriage as the rest did--as a tremendous and mysterious family event, calling forth an intense pride and melancholy, but no individual sense of guilt or responsibility so far as he was personally concerned. “I don’t like to take you out in a fly, Nelly,” Mrs. Eastwood would sometimes say, as she gave a last touch to Ellinor’s ribbons, and breathed a soft little sigh. “As if I cared!” cried the girl: “and besides, you can say, like Lady Dobson, that you never take your horses out at night.” Now Lady Dobson was very rich, and in trade, and a standing joke in the Eastwood circle; and the party went off very merry in the fly, with never another thought of the carriage which had been “put down.” Light-hearted folk! That sudden tempest of trouble and terror which had driven Frederick into the Sealing-Wax Office, and the ladies into Mr. Sutton’s neat flys, gave, I think, on the whole, a zest to their happiness. The drawing-room at The Elms was a large room, with a rounded end occupied by a great bow window, which opened like a door into a pretty conservatory, always gay with flowers. Opposite the fireplace were three other long and large windows, cut to the floor, from which you looked out over the long stretch of greensward embosomed in great trees which has been already described. In summer, the flower beds which were cut in the grass close under the windows were ablaze with brilliant colour; but in the meantime, on the afternoon when this story opens, nothing was visible but an interrupted golden line of crocus, defining each bed, and depending upon the sun to make the definition successful. When the day was bright the border bristled all round in close array with spikes of gold; but on this particular day it was gloomy, and the line was straggling and broken. On a damp February afternoon the strongest attraction is generally indoors; and the room was bright enough to satisfy the most difficult critic. Mrs. Eastwood had, as every mother of a family ought to have, her particular chair, with her particular little table and footstool, a detached and commanding position, a genial domestic throne, with the supremacy of which no one ever interfered. There was room for any one who wanted counsel to draw a chair by its side, and plenty of room for a big boy to stretch out his lazy length on the rug at its feet, resting a curly head, it might be, on the mother’s footstool. Mrs. Eastwood was seated here in her black gown with violet