“Glad to hear you have had a holiday, dear Glory, and trust you are feeling the better for the change. Must confess to being a little startled by the account of your adventure on Lord Mayor's Day, with the wild scheme for cutting adrift from the hospital and taking London by storm. But it was just like my little witch, my wandering gipsy, and I knew it was all nonsense; so when Aunt Anna began to scold I took my pipe and went upstairs. Sorry to hear that John Storm has gone over to Popery, for that is what it comes to, though he is not under the Romish obedience. I am the more concerned because I failed to make his peace with his father. The old man seems to blame me for everything, and has even taken to passing me on the road. Give my best respects to Mrs. Jupe, when you see her again, with my thanks for taking care of you. And now that you are alone in that great and wicked Babylon, take good care of yourself, my dear one. To know that my runaway is well and happy and prosperous is all I have left to reconcile me to her absence. Yes, the harvest is over and threshed and housed, and we have fires in the parlour nearly every day, which makes Anna severe sometimes, coals being so dear just now, and the turf no longer allowed to us.” It was ten days overdue. That night, in her little bedroom, with its low ceiling and sloping floor, Glory wrote her answer: “But it isn't nonsense, my dear grandfather, and I really have left the hospital. I don't know if it was the holiday and the liberty or what, but I felt like that young hawk at Glenfaba--do you remember it?--the one that was partly snared and came dragging the trap on to the lawn by a string caught round its leg. I had to cut it away, I had to, I had to! But you mustn't feel one single moment's uneasiness about me. An able-bodied woman like Glory Quayle doesn't starve in a place like London. Besides, I am provided for already, so you see my bow abides in strength. The first morning after my arrival Mrs. Jupe told me that if I cared to take to myself the style and title of teacheress to her little Slyboots I had only to say the word and I should be as welcome as the flowers in May. It isn't exactly first fiddling, you know, and it doesn't bring an ambassador's salary, but it may serve for the present, and give me time to look about. You mustn't pay too much attention to my lamentations about being compelled by Nature to wear a petticoat. Things being so arranged in this world I'll make them do. But it does make one's head swim and one's wings droop to see how hard Nature is on a woman compared to a man. Unless she is a genius or a jelly-fish there seems to be only one career open to her, and that is a lottery, with marriage for the prizes, and for the blanks--oh dear, oh dear! Not that I have anything to complain of, and I hate to be so sensitive. Life is wonderfully interesting, and the world is such an amusing place that I've no patience with people who run away from it, and if I were a