Poor Jean! all her life long she will believe in policemen from henceforward. Indeed, when she went from St. Pancras to the station for Wandsworth she refused to pay her cab till the policeman standing near told her what the fare was, amusing the bystanders not a little by her determined attitude and the suspicious look she gave the cabman. When she reached Grace, her fatigue, her adventures, everything gave way to compassion. For Grace was very ill, and needed good nursing and care, and, to poor Jean's eyes, the lodging and all belonging to it was not fit for any Christian, certainly not for a Scotchwoman. She wondered a good deal that Margaret never came near her sister, and made up her mind to go and look her up: Mrs. Dorriman had charged her to be a mother to both bairns, and she fully intended keeping her promise. In the meantime Margaret's little poem had been published, and she had received three golden sovereigns for her work. She knew so little of the value of literary work that she was not in the very least surprised; she felt only the deepest thankfulness that, if she had a gift, she could turn it to account for her beloved sister. Her poem was very touching, full of the faults of one whose education had never been extensive, but when she saw it in print she noticed a few alterations she considered improvements, and took for granted that these alterations were made as a matter of course by the editor. This was evidently the use of having an editor. Then she began calculating how many of these poems she could write in a week. Say she wrote four. Why there was at once twelve guineas a week; a livelihood, a large income! Why, oh why, had she not thought of this before? The impressions of her mind flowed naturally into rhyme. There was great beauty of thought, though much sameness in its delivery on paper. Her reading with Mrs. Dorriman had not been thrown away, and she began to be able to concentrate her thoughts on her work. The happiness of her life which she had missed, set all to a minor key, but it made her poems more beautiful. To touch the feelings of others, to appeal to their hearts, there must be reality, and reality only can exist from personal experience. Sometimes the extraordinary dreariness of her life appalled her. To rise day after day, knowing that a secret dread of a possible tragedy, enacted in her house, pursued her; to see no one, to go nowhere, since she was not allowed to cross the threshold. She had no idea that these facts, told to any one, would have immediately brought her release, and that any one, knowing what her life was, would have formed a juster conclusion of the state her husband was in.