valve. Then there was crewel work, and the patterns of the Art Needlework Society, of which, however, she soon got tired. Altogether Lady Curtis’s activity was stimulated to its utmost. She had the happiness of discovering a source of waste in the house, and an abuse in the parish; and she fell upon a nest of foolish books to criticize, and began a series of papers upon “The Minor Morals of Society;” and she set vigorously to work upon a set of curtains in a bold and effective pattern of her own invention. And thus she beguiled away the weary days. Lucy was less difficult perhaps than either her father or her mother. She was young, and it still seemed to her that in the course of nature everything that was amiss must come right, and every breach be mended. Sir John’s opinion was that nothing would ever mend, and his wife’s that the only thing to be done was to keep yourself busy, and persuade yourself that there was no hope nor expectation of any change within you. But Lucy waited with as much patience as she could, crying sometimes over the estrangement of her brother, but with no despair in her; things would come right, nay, must come right some time or other. To suppose that you could be separated for ever from anyone who belonged to you, anyone you loved! could there be folly in earth so great as that? It was a question of time, and the time was long and dreary and hard to support; but yet by and by _of course_, who could doubt it? everything would be well. November and December are dreary months, let us make the best of them, and very dreary in the country when the day is over by four o’clock or little after, and there are hours upon hours to be got through in-doors, in a big empty house, pervaded everywhere by that sense of the absent which is so much more urgent and all-prevailing than any presence. When Arthur had been at home his being there was a matter of course, and no one thought much about it; but when Arthur was away! and away in this dismal manner, absorbed into another life, disjointed from theirs. Such an argument as this might make the dullest feel the superiority of an idea to all that is solid and practical. In her own room, which Arthur rarely entered, Lucy missed her brother, and she missed him going about the parish, where he never went with her. And Sir John missed him in the midst of those Blue Books at which the boy had made grimaces from a distance, but which he never approached; and Lady Curtis felt his absence when she wrote for her Review, though Arthur was the last person in the world to know anything of Reviews. This is at once the desolation and the power of death which fills our very atmosphere and daily breath with those whom it removes out of our sight for ever; and this it was that gave force to the words which both father and mother said of Arthur when he forsook them. It was as if he had died.