half-forgotten, within her hard old breast. She accordingly wisely confined herself to passing comments upon Sidney, and to occasional references to Uncle Watty, directing most of her witty, satirical talk toward love and marriage in the abstract. One day she read Lynn a couple of lines from an old novel which said that:-- "Falling in love is like falling downstairs; it is always an accident, and nearly always a misfortune." She had many such dry and stinging epigrams at her sharp tongue's end in those days, when she was using wit, satire, irony, and ridicule as weapons to defend her late-coming happiness. Poor old lady Gordon! it was very hard. Selfishness always makes opposition bitterly hard, and it is hard indeed to have been compelled to wait through the space of a generation for the supreme desire of the heart. It was harder than a nature so imperious as hers could endure, to meet such ignoble interference at this eleventh hour, now that its late fulfilment seemed so near, now that she herself had so little time for longer waiting. So thus it was that scornful impatience gradually gave way to bitter anger, to the fierce, compelling anger of the autocrat long unused to having her will crossed, much less lightly set aside, and, least of all, to having it totally disregarded. It was lightly and even gayly that Lynn had gone his own way in opposition to hers; but when their wills had clashed slightly once or twice, old lady Gordon had seen that they were made of the same piece of cold steel. She had recognized the fact with a queer mixture of pride and displeasure, but the recognition had turned her away from all thought of force, and she had henceforth resorted to subtler measures. She had tried--with a gentleness so foreign to her nature that it was pathetic--to keep him at her side, as a tigress might softly stretch out a paw--every cruel claw sheathed in velvet--to draw a cub away from danger. But this too failed, as the efforts of the old to hold the young always must fail when nature calls. And thus it was that the lingering twilights of those last summer days found old lady Gordon again alone, as the judge had found her; again solitary at lonely nightfall; again--with the long night so near--gazing into the gathering darkness at the ghostly assemblage of all her dead hopes.