They are at Madeira now, those three sad and silent women; sad and silent, for Lady Millicent was too old to change the habits of a life, and Rhoda--depressed not only by a blighted attachment but by the sickness which is unto death--makes no effort to seem the thing she is not. Only Kate still longs and pines to be happy, but it is hard to fight against reality, and very hard to kick against the pricks. She _knows_ that the fiat has gone forth, and that her poor pale Rhoda--the Rhoda who might, so Katie thinks, have been the contented wife of stupid George Wallingford--is to die. She foresees a dismal future with the mother whom she believes to be the cause of all their various sorrows, and Katherine’s rosy face begins to lose its freshness, and her voice its joyous tone while dwelling on the sadness of the days to come. * * * * * Reader, there is no crime related in these volumes; no commandment has been ostensibly and boldly broken; and yet the consequences of hidden sins, of sins unwhipped of justice, have proved terribly disastrous both to the “living that now live, and to the dead that have been called to judgment.” It is not always, it is not even often, that the results of an indulgence in evil passions, in iniquitous desires, and in the hungering after the things that belong neither of our own peace nor to that of others, are brought immediately before us. It may be that while we, in a safe haven from the storms of life at the season when “Age steals to its allotted nook, Contented and serene,”