Oswald scarcely knew in what sense to take the word. He hesitated as he looked at Miss Davenal. "How has it all come about? Let me hear the whole of it; the best and the worst. His wife professes to know nothing, and it was of no use my asking her. The water has got into the mine." "It is said to be overflowing it; but particulars are not ascertained yet," replied Oswald, as he proceeded to speak of what he knew. It was not much, for he was nearly as much in the dark as they were. Miss Davenal listened with compressed lips. At the conclusion of the interview, Oswald took Miss Davenal out to the fly upon his arm, placed her in it, and turned to Sara. "The last time I saw you I had a journey in my head," he said in a low tone; "I told you I was going to Spain." "Yes." "I am not going now. I have given up the idea. We shall send out a gentleman instead; my friend, Frank Allister. Goodnight; goodnight, Miss Davenal." Severely upright in the carriage sat Miss Davenal, her countenance one picture of condemnation for the absent Mark. Only once did she open her lips to Sara opposite to her, and that was as the carriage turned out of the glare and gas of the more populous streets to the quiet one which contained their home. "What would your brother Edward say to this, were he at home?" What would he say to something else? As the carriage drew up to the door, a female figure was slowly pacing before it, as if in waiting. And Sara shrank into the remotest corner of the carriage with a shiver of dread, for she recognised her for the stranger. Catherine Wentworth. CHAPTER L. HARD USAGE FOR DICK. Do you remember the severe weather of the Christmas of 1860? How for once we had an old-fashioned Christmas day, when the icicles hung bright and frozen from the trees and the ponds were alive with skaters, after the manner of the Christmases we read of, of the days gone by. It was indeed a bitter winter, that at the close of 1860, and an unusual number of the poor and friendless, the sick and ailing, passed from its biting sharpness to a better world. In the mind of one it almost seemed as though he had held some mysterious prevision of it; and that was Oswald Cray. When deliberating, the previous autumn, whether he should go to Spain himself, times and again had the thought recurred to him--what if we have a sharp winter?--how will Allister weather it? And now that the sharp winter, more terribly sharp than even Oswald dreamt of, had indeed come, he was thankful to have sacrificed his own self-interest. In that more southern climate Allister would no feel the cold of this; and it almost seemed as if the thought alone brought to Oswald his reward. "Isn't it stunning, Aunt Bett?"