those of the Father of Spirits. It is probable that at this time Mrs. Streightley was as happy as she had ever been in all her blameless but uninteresting life. She did not care much about public repute, except in the sense of the impugnment of commercial honesty; and as Robert's character stood as high as ever, in spite of his pecuniary disasters, she cared not at all that the world should talk about his domestic affairs. The world which did so talk was not her world. Brixton and Clapham, the Pratts and the Perkinses, the "connection," and the ministers thereof, said little about the separation between her son and his beautiful "high-flying" wife, and that little had a consolatory tendency; for these good people seemed to think Robert's eternal prospects improved by the occurrence, and it was no part of their creed to trouble themselves about those of Katharine. The old lady had her son with her again; the former routine was resumed: if Robert was unhappy, he did not show it; and she could not understand how he could fret after a woman who had never been a wife to him,--"not what I call a wife, at least," she would say, on the very rare occasions when she mentioned the matter. She was a good woman in her way; but she essentially belonged to the narrow-minded order of human beings, and was quite incapable of realising the fact that though she had seen nothing to like, and little even to admire, in Katharine, her son had seen in her all the value and the glory of life to him, and was living, under her kind, motherly, but unobservant eyes, a broken-hearted man.