"Mr. Drayton asked us to take asylum at Netherby Hall till such time as we join my father elsewhere. My mother knows what Harry thought, and seems not averse to accept his hospitality. I certainly had not thought to enter old Netherby again in such guise as this." OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS. The old house seemed to gain a kind of sacredness when it became the refuge of that dear bereaved Lady and sweet Lettice. Lady Lucy was much changed. Her voice always soft, was low as the soft notes in a hymn; her step, always light, was slower and feebler; her hair, though still abundant, had changed from luxuriant auburn to a soft silvery brown; her cheeks were worn into a different curve, though still, I thought, as beautiful, and the colour in them was paler. Everything in her seemed to have changed from sunset to moonlight. Her voice and her very thoughts seem to come from afar; from some region we could not tread, like music borne over still waters. It was as if she had crossed a river which severed her far from us, which she would never more recross, but only wait till the call came to mount the dim heights on the other side. Not that she was in any way sad or uninterested, or abstracted, only she did not seem to belong to us any more. I wondered if Lettice saw this as I did. And many a time the tears came to my eyes as I looked at those two and thought how strong were the cords of love which bound them, and how feeble the thread of life. Aunt Dorothy welcomed Lady Lucy with as true a tenderness as any one. The silvery hair in place of those heart-breakers--the hair silvered so suddenly by sorrow--softened her in more ways than one. One thing, however, tried her sorely. And I much dreaded the explosion it might lead to if Aunt Dorothy's conscience once got the upper hand of her hospitality. The Lady Lucy always had a little erection closely resembling an altar, in her oratory at home, dressed in white, with sacred books on it; the Holy Scriptures, A Kempis, Herbert, and others, and above them a copy of a picture by Master Albert Durer, figuring our Lord on the Cross, the suffering thorn-crowned form gleaming pale and awful from the terrible noonday darkness. Before this solemn picture stood two golden candlesticks, which at night the waiting gentlewomen were wont to light. I shall never forget Aunt Dorothy's expression of dismay and distress when she first saw this erection, one evening soon after Lady Lucy's arrival. She mastered herself so far as to say nothing to Lady Lucy then, beyond the good wishes for the night, and directions as to some possets which she had come to administer. But the solemn change that came over her voice and face she could not conceal. And afterwards she solemnly summoned us into my Father's private room to make known her discovery. "An idol, brother!" she concluded, "an abomination! At this moment, probably, idol-worship going on under this roof, drawing down on us all the lightnings of heaven!"