“To fill Tom’s place!” said Marjory, with an outburst of sudden tears. “Oh, my little Milly, that is what we do even when we love best. My father is breaking his heart for Tom; yet he wants Charlie to fill Tom’s place.” “Nobody could ever fill _your_ place, May,” cried Milly; “I would never let them; dinna cry. I could cry too, for papa never minds me, never looks at me; and oh, he’s so strange; the house is so strange! but May, so long as there is you--” The little girl’s arms clinging round her neck were a comfort to Marjory. Little Milly was wounded too; she had received that first lesson of her own unimportance, which is hard even for a child; she was half indignant, half angry even with “poor Tom,” though she cried at the sound of his name--and very sore about Charlie, whom everybody wished for. “They have May, and what do they want more?” this faithful little maiden said to herself. “When Tom was living we never saw him; and nobody ever thought of Charlie. Why do they make such a fuss now? when they have May!” Fanshawe went with Mr. Charles to his room. After the scene of the morning he felt sadly out of place, an intruder into the family life. It seemed to him that he ought to go away; and only the day before he had felt the tediousness of the existence so much that any excuse for going away would have seemed a godsend; but yet, at the same time, he felt that he did not want to go. Why, he could not have told; he seemed to have been caught in the web of this family’s life, to be waiting for some _dénouement_ or for some new turn in the story. He had known nothing of them two weeks before; yet now he was a member of the household, a spectator of the father’s misery, of the effort of the family to right itself after this terrible blow. They seemed all to be playing their parts before him, while he was the judge chance had appointed to decide how they all fulfilled their _rôle_. With this curious sensation in his mind he went over Mr. Charles’s treasures--his prints, his cabinets of coins, his little collection of old jewellery, which he had ranged in boxes under glass covers. “Here is a necklace that I sometimes lend to May,” the old man said, pointing out a delicate circlet in fine enamel, and the lightest fairy goldsmith’s work. “It was brought to her great grandmother, Leddy Pitcomlie, from Rome, in the beginning of last century, and is said to have belonged to a line of great Italian beauties, whom I need not name. They’re all written out on the case. I can recollect seeing it on the old Leddy’s withered neck.” “Then you had a title in the family in those days?”