occasionally out of tune, but with something hopelessly vulgar in its intonation--singing her favorite song-- Oh, if I had some one to love me, My troubles and trials to share! Percival turned his back on the blue vase and the little book, and flinging himself into a chair before the fire sickened at the thought of the life he was doomed to lead. Lydia, who was just mounting with a little uncertainty to a high note, was a good girl in her way, and good-looking, and had a kind sympathy for him in his evident loneliness. But was she to be the highest type of womanhood that he would meet henceforth? And was Bellevue street to be his world? He glided into a mournful dream of Brackenhill, which would never be his, and of Sissy, who had loved him so well, yet failed to love him altogether--Sissy, who had begged for her freedom with such tender pain in her voice while she pierced him so cruelly with her frightened eyes. Percival looked very stern in his sadness as he sat brooding over his fire, while from the room below came a triumphant burst of song-- But I will marry my own love, For true of heart am I. Sometimes he would picture to himself the future which lay before Horace's three-months-old child, whose little life already played so all--important a part in his own destiny. He had questioned Hammond about him, and Hammond had replied that he heard that Lottie and the boy were both doing well. "They say that the child is a regular Blake, just like Lottie herself," said Godfrey, "and doesn't look like a Thorne at all." Percival thought, not unkindly, of Lottie's boy, of Lottie's great clear eyes in an innocent baby face, and imagined him growing up slim and tall, to range the woods of Brackenhill in future years as Lottie herself had wandered in the copses about Fordborough. And yet sometimes he could not but think of the change that it might make if little James William Thorne were to die. Horace was very ill, they said: Brackenhill was shut up, and they had all gone to winter abroad. The doctors had declared that there was not a chance for him in England.