choose between the old home and the new, between her parents and her husband. Arthur had a generous mind, and this perception kept him from feeling himself the aggrieved person, as he had been half disposed to do. It forced him, also, instead of wandering about as he had done on the previous night, and brooding over the difficulties of his new position, to go back to his hotel and really write the half imaginary letters which were his only business, and the reason which he had again given for his abandonment of that family circle. His letters were not all imaginary: there was one from Mr. Rolt, the agent, in answer to Arthur’s letter to his father. Sir John had been too indignant, as well as perhaps (but this he was not conscious of) too little disposed for exertion to answer it himself. He had handed over the note, not to the lawyer brother, against whom Arthur had vowed vengeance, but to the agent, who had always been a favourite, the friend of their youth, with the young Curtises, both boy and girl. Mr. Rolt’s letter was very kind and reasonable, and to answer it without proving himself to be in the wrong was difficult. Sir John did not object to raising his allowance--he did not refuse anything Arthur asked him. There was nothing hard in the stipulations, nothing forbidding in what his father’s deputy wrote. “Your family do not wish you to suffer, how could you think it?--they do not wish to reduce you from your natural position. Had you treated them as they might have expected to be treated, my dear Arthur,” wrote the good man who had known him all his life, “you might, I think, have reckoned on Sir John’s indulgence to any extent; but you have not put that trust in your father and mother, though they certainly deserved it at your hands; and can you wonder if Sir John is angry? He will not write to you himself, feeling that your letter is not the kind of letter he ought to have had from you in the circumstances; but he has instructed me to tell you that your wishes shall be complied with to any reasonable amount. He does not wish you to suffer in personal comfort in consequence of the step you have taken.”