Alsager, his son, should marry Helen Manningtree, his ward. The two who had penetrated the inmost feelings of the old man were Cuthbert Farleigh and Mrs. Chisholm. How sped the days with Colonel Alsager in the old home? Heavily, to say the least of it. He had undergone strong excitement of various kinds; and now reaction had set in, with the unspeakable relief of his father's reprieve from immediate death. During his journey from Redmoor to Knockholt he had been an unresisting prey to bitter and confused regrets; so bitter, they seemed almost like remorse; so unavailing, they touched the confines of despair. The scenes in which he had lately played a part, the problems he had been endeavouring to solve, rushed from his view, and retired to the recesses of his memory,--to come out again, and occupy him more closely, more anxiously than ever, when the cruel grasp of suspense and terror was removed from his heart; when the monotony of the quiet house, and the life regulated by the exigencies of that of an invalid, had fairly settled down upon him; when all the past seemed distant, and all the future had more than the ordinary uncertainty of human existence. There was no estrangement between Laurence and his father now; but the son knew that there was no more similarity than before. Their relative positions had altered, and with the change old things had passed away. The pale and shrunken old man who lay patiently on his couch beside the large window of the library at Knockholt, at which the peacocks had now learned to tap and the dogs to sniff, was not the silent though urbane, the hale and _arriéré_ country gentleman to whom his Guardsman's life had been an unattractive mystery, and all his ways distasteful. That Guardsman's life, those London ways, the shibboleth of his set, even the distinctive peculiarities of his own individuality, had all been laid aside, almost obliterated, by the dread reality which had drawn so near, and still, as they both knew, was unobtrusively ever nigh at hand. Father and son were much together at certain regulated times; and Laurence was unfailing in his scrupulous observance of all the wishes, his intuitive perception of all the fancies, of the invalid. Still there were many hours of solitude to be got through in every day; and Laurence Alsager held stricter and truer commune with his own heart, while they passed over the dial, than he had ever been used to hold. The quiet of the house; the seclusion of the park in which he walked and rode; the formal beauty of the garden, where he strolled with Helen Manningtree, and listened to her enthusiastic expectations of what its appearance would be when the time of flowers should have fully arrived; the regularity of the household; the few and trivial interruptions from without;--all these things had a strong influence on the sensitive temperament of Laurence Alsager, and gradually isolated him within himself. There was