All the evening, while they dined, read the papers, and, later on, in deference to the beauty of the night, strolled through the quiet streets towards the Regent’s Park, and saw the moon hanging like a silver disc in the sky—while Mark, following his lead, discoursed of the lovely woods of Sunbridge, of the hedges fragrant with wild roses and honeysuckle, of the sweet, pure air, of his mother and her garden, of his sister singing in the twilight to the old piano—there always lay the thought suggested to him by the words of Evans in the afternoon, “As things have turned out, it really seems quite providential.” Mark Fenner was already much more to him than he could ever have hoped from one who was not his own son; he was doing his work with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his strength, accepting it as the business of his life. But might not he for his part—he, Miles Echlin—do something on his side also to make the lad’s life brighter—to make the house in Manchester-square, now for nearly thirty years his home, a little more cheery and a little more homelike to the boy who had grown up in the little cottage at the rectory gate at Rosenhurst? If there is much cause of lamentation at the overcrowded dwellings of the poor, something might also be said plaintive and touching about the desolation of the houses of the wealthy—of the rich carpets so seldom trodden, the couches on which no limbs ever find repose, the mirrors reflecting nothing but each other, of the soft beds which are never pressed, and all the elaborate machinery of modern life gathered into chamber after chamber, and never used. Extremes meet, and the rich man in the desolation of his empty chambers may be as much in need of pity as the poor man crowded out of his one apartment by the superabundance of his domestic ties.