wife was dead, and have been roused out of his happiness by the terrible news that this was not true. Such a thing is not uncommon in fiction, for instance; and Mr. Ford, like many busy men, was a great novel reader. He was ready even, terrible though it would be, to hear that this was the cause of his brother-in-law’s disappearance. But, perhaps, he hoped, it might be something not so bad as that. He was a long time gone, so long, that Trix got alarmed, and in her uneasiness burst into Grace’s room, who was going to rest, to wait with what patience she might for the morning, which, she said to herself, must end all suspense. Her self-restraint was sadly broken by the irruption into her room of Trix in all her fever of alarm. ‘Where do you think he can have gone? Oh, what do you think can have happened to him?--such dreadful things happen in London,’ Mrs. Ford cried, rising gradually into higher and higher excitement. She thought of garroters; of roughs who might have followed him along the Embankment (though she scarcely knew where that was), and already her imagination figured him lying on the pavement senseless, perhaps unconscious, unable to tell anyone where to carry him. ‘The only address that would be found upon him would be our address at home, and if they telegraphed there, and then telegraphed here, how much time must be lost? And it is too late even to telegraph,’ she cried, as these miserable anticipations gained upon her. But what could two women do in a London hotel? They could not go out with a lantern and search for his body about the streets, and they did not even know where or in what direction he had gone. ‘He has gone to find your brother,’ Grace suggested once; but Trix would not hear of this. ‘Never,’ she said, ‘without letting me know.’ At last, when it was long past midnight, a hansom drove up to the hotel, and Mr. Ford appeared, exceedingly pale and with an air of great agitation and distress. He told them that Oliver had been very ill: that he would have to leave England, to get into a milder climate. He would not be more explicit; a milder climate and to get out of England, that was all he would say. He had a letter in his hand which he had been reading as best he could by the lamplight as he drove back, and by the dying candles in Wentworth’s room, into which he had forced his way. He told his wife as soon as they were alone that he had found on Oliver’s desk this long letter addressed to himself, and gave her an outline of the story, which brought out such a shriek from Trix, as sounded through the partition and startled Grace once more in the solitude of her room, to which she had returned. She appeared between the husband and wife a minute after in her white dressing gown, white as the gown she wore.