Sometimes she wondered, after all, if she and Charlie had made a mistake and had started too ambitiously at the very outset. Yet they had then seemed entrenched on the safe side. Her own kin, beginning with the Brands, had all thought the little house with the verandah only too small for a young man of Charlie’s talents and prospects. “You will have the trouble and expense of speedy removal,” they had urged. These kindred had said, too, that the furnishing was unnecessarily simple. “That was a fault which might be gradually remedied,” Florence Brand had remarked. “But it was well to make a dash at the beginning, even if one economised afterwards, because in the first year of one’s married life people noticed one’s house more and talked about it more than they ever did afterwards.” But Charlie and Lucy had been firm, because they were determined not to run in debt, because they wanted to save as much as they could, to possess nothing that would be costly in its up-keep, or likely to tempt them into expensive ways, and because they both loved the beauty of simple form and the sweet cleanliness of things that are easy to dust and possible to wash. Then Florence had privately urged Lucy to start with two servants. “Get two smart girls for low wages,” she had said, “you won’t have much to do for a long time, except to watch that they are honest. It sounds well to say ‘my cook’ and ‘my housemaid.’ People think of a general servant as a mere slavey.” But Lucy had steadily persisted in having only one, and Pollie’s diligence and progress had rewarded her. Now, however, Lucy asked herself whether Charlie and she had done the very best after all. True, they had not satisfied the ideas of the Brands and others; but ought they not to have gone still farther in the opposite direction and contented themselves with a tiny flat and foregone any regular servant? It was true that the plan they had followed had been sound enough economically. The lease of the little house in Pelham Street had been bought by Charlie’s prenuptial savings, and the yearly expenditure had not been much larger than it must have been in the imaginary flat, Pollie’s domestic help having given Lucy time to do all the family needlework and to economise in those ways which leisure makes consistent with grace and beauty. To Lucy the life seemed to have been idyllic. But, then, at its foundation had been Pollie. So, if Pollies were an element not to be readily reckoned upon, life only was secure when it was planned to do without them. (_To be continued._) USEFUL HINTS. GENERAL RULES FOR MAKING JAM. 1. Gather the fruit on a dry day. 2. Pick it over carefully and see that it is free of insects, and take away any that is decayed. 3. Put the fruit in the pan and let it juice over the fire; add the sugar, which should be warmed, by degrees. 4. Use good white sugar for preserving; the cheaper kinds do not go so far.