commenting, without any responsibility. No privilege could have been more delightful to him than this; and when he had now and then returned for a few days to his own house, he had been, as it were, a banished man. To be sure if he went to his own house now, he could take the only remaining children of the family with him, and make a home for himself by their means; but this brought in the element of responsibility which he feared, and of which up to this moment he had kept clear. No wonder that Mr. Charles closed his portfolios hurriedly, and sat down in his chair with a sigh. If only any means could be thought of, any device fallen upon, for compromising the matter, and keeping things as they were. Marjory, strangely enough, was infinitely less sensitive. Though she had no other home, and had never contemplated another--though it was impossible to her to realize the fact that she was no longer mistress of Pitcomlie, yet the possibility of change affected her much less strongly. Her whole being seemed to be dulled and slower of perception. She sent away the servants who came to her as usual for orders, and felt no pain. She even arranged her books and her papers for going away, without any sharp sense of the hardship of leaving her home. She had no particular feeling of any kind. Life seemed to be running low in her, and sometimes grief plucked at her heart; but for other emotions, she did not seem to have any. The thing she felt most was, that she missed something. What was it? Something she had been used to had slid from her. There was a vague want which she could not, and perhaps did not, wish to identify. Fanshawe had gone away that morning. She had been moved by his leave-taking, almost more than she thought seemly in her circumstances. She had a strong feeling of what was fit and natural, and the curious vague excitement with which his last looks and words filled her, seemed strangely out of place, and even wrong. She repressed the feeling with a strong hand; but she did not suspect that the blank sense of inability to feel anything which had crept over her could be connected with that repression in any way. She was dull, dull to the depths of her heart and to the tips of her fingers. Nothing seemed to affect her. As for the little vexations of the household, the transference of her powers, these moved her no more than pin-pricks. She was quite ready to have gone away, and would not have felt it. When she was called downstairs by an intimation that Miss Jean was seen coming up to the great door to visit the family, she obeyed the call without any particular sentiment. Matilda and her sister were both in the drawing-room when Marjory went in, and Miss Jean, leaning upon her cane, in her new “blacks,” to which she had added another fold of crape for each new death, was standing in the middle of the room, looking at them. Matilda had not budged from her sofa. She had nodded, and said, “How