‘Do you sit here now, Fan?’ he asked his sister with a little surprise, and an involuntary tone of disappointment. But even as he spoke, he began to reproach himself privately for the question—so like a man’s blundering to put it, within the first moment of his arrival too. To be sure poor Fan still found the old sitting-room too full of sad memories to be encountered without an effort. How could he, even in imagination, have condemned a girl to sit alone where the old family circle had been formed, with a dreary sense of a blank never to be filled up, in one corner, and in one chair, constantly present to her mind? It mattered little what room they occupied just then, and only a stupid, thoughtless fellow would have drawn attention to the change, thus carelessly probing the wound. Oliver hastily directed the conversation to something else, without waiting for an answer to his question, and in doing so accepted the new domestic arrangement without protest—all the same his thoughts had been dwelling vaguely but persistently throughout his railway journey on the familiar low-browed room. The local attachments, which did not exist for Fan, approached to a passion in Oliver’s nature. He had seen, without trying to see them, his father’s big chair and ponderous writing-desk, opposite which Fan’s little table and work-basket used to stand. He had contemplated idly and half absently as if he had been on the spot, the high wooden chimney-piece painted grey, and having in relief, only in stucco unfortunately, clusters of wheat ears—as if the chimney-piece had been designed expressly for a miller and baker’s hearth—the corner cupboards, the odd nondescript article of furniture in old mahogany which was neither side-board nor side-table, nor cabinet, but which had the handiest shelves, the roomiest drawers conceivable. At this season the purplish red roses were budding in such profusion round the windows of the old parlour, that if a high wind came when the roses were in full bloom, their petals would—as Oliver had seen them before—be stripped off, and swept in a stream on the faded worsted moss of the carpet as thick as leaves in Vallombrosa. There were seats in the windows on which Oliver had often gathered up his long legs and disposed of his arms in an attitude the most excruciating to the eye of the spectator, yet the most restful to the body of the performer. Oliver had been addicted, from boyhood, to employing these low window ledges as convenient steps to the court, a practice which obviated any trouble of opening and closing doors. He had been prone to sitting half in half out of a window, with his legs dangling to the ground; when he occupied the post in June, he had felt himself like an old Greek crowned with roses, and as it was his only chance of such a distinction he had borne with stoicism sundry pricks and scratches from aggressive stems, and faced philosophically the dropping of rose leaves—possibly of earwigs and ladybirds—within the