her that I was very sorry for her. I could say no more than that. ‘You would be sorrier still if you could picture to yourself the miserable life I led before I left my husband,’ she said. ‘I bore it for five years, years that seemed an eternity. He cared for me no more than for the flower-girls in the street. He left me to pine in my dingy lodging, left me to be dunned and worried all day long, left me out-at-elbows, ashamed of my own shabbiness, while he amused himself at his club; and then he considered himself cruelly used when he found out there was another man in the world who thought me worth caring for, and when I told him I loved that man with all my heart. My leaving him was the impulse of a moment. The moment came when his brutality turned the scale, and I ran out of the house in my despair, and jumped into the first cab I could hail, and drove away to _him_,’ pointing to the man in the distance, strolling beside my two gawky girls, ‘and to happiness. I am a wicked wretch, no doubt, to be happy under such circumstances, but I am, or, at any rate, as happy as anybody can hope to be in this world. There is always a thorn among the flowers,’ she sighed, as if the thorn was a big one, I thought. ‘I suppose I shall never see you again,’ she said. ‘When we say good-bye presently, it will be farewell for ever.’ I told her that was not inevitable. I was my own mistress, free to choose my friends. I told her that if ever she had need of a friend I would go to her. I felt that I was in some wise answerable for the bad turn her life had taken, for had I been a more judicious counsellor, I might have guided her better, might have prevented her coming into collision with her father. I asked her for her address, but she told me she had promised to tell nobody where she lived. ‘We are living out of the world,’ she said, ‘we have no visitors, no friends or acquaintance.’ She clasped my hands, kissed me, and hurried away to rejoin the man whose name I never learned. He lifted his hat to me and the girls, and they walked away together towards the Star and Garter, leaving us standing by Thomson’s Seat, staring idly at the landscape in the summer sunlight. I felt dazed as I stood there, looking down into that lovely valley. It had been a terrible shock to me to meet her again under such circumstances.” CHAPTER XVI. “Be useful where thou livest, that they may Both want and wish thy pleasing presence still. ... All worldly joys go less To the one joy of doing kindnesses.” “What impression did the man make upon you in that brief meeting?” asked Theodore. “Did he strike you as a _roué_?”