no business of mine, and I kept my thoughts to myself. The time went by, and still there was no news of Mr. Lesley coming home. He was always going farther and farther north, Susan told me, when she spoke of him; but she’d got to talk of him very little now, though I know she was thinking of him and fretting about him all day and all night too: for I’ve slept with her sometimes, and heard her moan in her sleep, and speak his name, oh, so pitiful!” “Poor girl! poor child! she was little more than a child!” murmured Francis Tredethlyn. “No more she was,” answered Miss Banks, with energy; “and him as ill-treated her was a brute. I’m sure _I_ never thought much of him, with his scornful, sneering ways, treating me and mother as if we were so much dirt under his feet. As for that poor young thing, it was a sorrowful day for her when she first set eyes upon him, fine gentleman though he was, and above her in station, which she was always telling me as a kind of excuse for his bad conduct. Well, sir, his letters got fewer and fewer, and still Susan kept her troubles to herself, and only said he was going farther north, and that he would he back before the year was out. But the year passed, and he didn’t come back, and he’d been away nearly ten months, and the baby was fourteen months old, when a letter came for Susan, with St. Petersburg on the post-mark. I never shall forget that day. It was dull, cold, March weather, with the wind howling and moaning enough to give the liveliest person the dismals, and Mrs. Lesley had been sitting by the window all the afternoon watching for the postman. She was beginning to be nervous about her husband’s health, she told me, as it was so long since she had heard from him. The postman came at last, and I was down-stairs with mother when he came. Mrs. Lesley ran into the passage, and took the letter herself. We heard the parlour door shut, and then five minutes afterwards we heard a scream and a heavy fall. Me and mother rushed up-stairs, and there was poor Susan lying on the floor, with a letter clutched in her hand, and the fingers clenched upon it so that neither me nor mother could loosen them. We lifted her up and laid her on the sofa. She didn’t seem to have fainted dead away, for she opened her eyes directly, and said, ‘Oh, why didn’t you let me lie there till I died?’ And it was enough to pierce the hardest heart to hear her. Mother began talking about the troubles of the world, and asked her if there was bad news in the letter. ‘Oh, yes!’ she cried; ‘cruel news--dreadful news!’ And then mother asked her, Was Mr. Lesley dead? ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘dead to me! dead to me!’ Mother fancied she meant he was really dead, and said she hoped Mrs. Lesley was left comfortably provided for. You see, having seen a deal of trouble herself, mother will look at things in that light. And then Susan cried out that her trouble was one that we could never understand. I couldn’t