One morning he did not come to his daughter’s room as was his wont. He had waited on her hand and foot. He had risen first and done the menial work of the little rooms they rented in a side street. He had pottered about in his old-fashioned Country way, and put things ship-shape, and then gone up to the invalid’s room with a gentle step, carrying her a cup of tea made with his own hand. One morning Bess woke and heard the clock strike. It was an hour later than her father’s usual time to stand by her bedside. Alarmed, she rose and dressed herself hurriedly, taxing her new-found strength. She went across to his room, knocked, and received no answer. She pushed the door open and ran to the bedside. ‘Father,’ she cried, ‘are you ill? Speak, father, speak!’ The face—the dear old face that had never frowned on her—lay on the pillow still, though the sun was high. There was a sweet smile on it, sueh as she had often seen there in the days before their troubles came. It was a calm, happy face that Bess gazed upon that morning, and well it might be, for all the old lodge-keeper’s troubles were over at last. The poverty he had dreaded would never come upon him now. The labour he had nerved himself for he would never be called upon to do. God had willed it otherwise, and had called him home to rest. Who shall say that that night in his dreams fancy had not touched his eyelids with her fairy fingers and bidden him see the old happy home-life once again? He had died in his sleep with a smile upon his honest face. And the woman who clasped the cold hand, and knelt by the little bed and sobbed, was henceforth alone in the world. CHAPTER XLV. A FRIEND IN NEED. Mrs. Adrian never read the newspaper herself. Her eyes ‘were not what they used to be,’ and she declined to avail herself of the artificial aid of glasses. She had tried spectacles at first, but she had always been laying them down and losing them, or treading on them and breaking them.