mere jumble of inherited instincts and impulses. The state of Jacynth’s mind, during his friend’s absence upon his fruitless and bootless quest in Guernsey, was just such as a scientific French novelist would have loved to fathom and explain. In so doing he would have performed a feat of which the object of his investigation was himself utterly incapable, for Jacynth, for reasons best known to himself, shrank from making too close an examination of his feelings and desires at this particular period. It might have been that he was afraid of facing the conclusion which lurked at the bottom of them. There was a small balcony at the Liverpool hotel, just outside the room wherein Ronny was being coaxed into convalescence by his mother, where our hero would sit smoking his cigar until late in the afternoon, following out a train of disjointed thoughts that he essayed to drive away upon the circling wreaths of smoke drifting before him into the void. Perhaps they were more impressions than thoughts, half sad, half pleasant musings that it was safer not to reduce to coherent shape. He was conscious throughout of a dominant wish that the present time could be prolonged into an indefinite future; not at the cost of sickness and suffering to his unfortunate friend, but only, perhaps, at the cost of a timely prolongation of the actual gales which prevented the Guernsey boats from putting to sea. He had not willed that his signature should appear upon the telegram to Fenella in connection with her husband’s; but since fate and (to say the truth) Frank’s folly in running off upon a wild-goose chase of his own had combined to leave him in charge, he could not but feel that there was a certain poetical justice in the situation, which it was allowable to enjoy to the full while it lasted. He pondered a good deal upon Fenella’s character, which seemed to have revealed itself to him latterly in a new light. He remembered that her first question, her first cry, as she rushed into the hotel, had been for her child. It was only afterward that she had shown any solicitude concerning the fate of Ronny’s father. Then, had she not resigned herself to the lot--nay, had she not willfully chosen it--of a self-constituted grass widow for years unnumbered? Her child, however, she had kept by her side, and, as far as could be seen, he had satisfied all the needs of her heart, for Jacynth was of those who believed that the train-attendant of Fenella’s adorers had had nothing to say to her heart, thought they might have amused her vanity. Could she belong, he asked himself, to the order of women of whom Dumas, _fils_, speaks, when he says that in certain natures the instinct of maternity overcomes the instinct of wifehood, and that the woman ceases to be wife and mother, and becomes mother and wife, or possibly mother only? In that case any man who should prove himself a true friend and protector of her little boy might be sure of having a warm second place in her heart.