so long as Robert made no choice at all, but devoted himself exclusively to his business; and now that he had chosen a beautiful, fashionable young lady, whose habits, whose pursuits, whose very speech was all but unintelligible to her, she would be content still. Her religious principles were largely assisted by her natural temperament; and their combined action made her the most inoffensive, the most distant, and the most silent of mothers-in-law. "But you have never seen my fine country-house, mother; you will surely come and see it," Robert remonstrated, when his mother requested him to bear her excuses to Katharine. "I shall see it in time, my dear," she answered, "never fear; but you must let me have my own way; you know I have always had it;" and she smiled gently, with the touching smile of the old looking back upon the past "Your wife must have many friends whom she wishes to see. I could neither bear to find myself among fine people, to whom I am totally unaccustomed, nor to feel that I was excluding her friends. You will be constantly in town, Robert, and you will come and see me very often." And then she began to speak of his health, to inquire into the details of Katharine's illness at Martigny; and Robert saw that the matter must remain as it was for the present. It was, however, decided that Ellen should accept Katharine's invitation; and accordingly she made her appearance at Middlemeads within a fortnight of Katharine's installation in her new house. It would have needed a less kindly nature than Katharine's--in which, perverted as it was, true womanly feeling had its place--to resist the frank and innocent gaiety of Ellen, the _naïf_ pleasure which she showed in the inspection of the house, her admiration of the luxurious furniture, and her surprise at finding herself in a scene of such unaccustomed splendour, and yet, after a fashion, at home there. All this was her brother's--all this was Robert's, who had been so well content with the modest comfort of the Brixton villa; and the beautiful young woman who had inspired him with tastes thus gratified, and admitted him into a circle of society of which Ellen had never before had even a glimpse, was her own sister-in-law. She had a kind of prescriptive right to be intimate with her; she wondered whether she might venture to call her "Katharine." Not on the first day of her visit certainly; for though Katharine was perfectly polite, there was no approach to familiarity in her manner; and she inquired, at luncheon, whether "Miss Streightley" would drive, in a tone which seemed to render any such sisterly appellations as "Ellen" and "Katharine" hopeless. But this did not last: they were, after all, two young girls; and the very superiority of intellect and of breeding, of which Katharine was conscious, made her readier to thaw towards Ellen, whose admiration of her brother's beautiful wife was as sincere and single-hearted as it was warm and humble. The warnings of the Rev.