The language that was heard when the guests came to take their machines away, was, as may well be supposed, more emphatic than polite. THE HOUSE WITH THE VERANDAH. BY ISABELLA FYVIE MAYO, Author of “Other People’s Stairs,” “Her Object in Life,” etc. CHAPTER XXV. THE NEWS THAT CAME AT LAST. Mrs. Bray’s end did not prove so imminent as her faithful Rachel had feared. She lingered on, though still unable to leave Bath for return to her desolated home. So Florence Brand came back to London, but she and Jem still often took “a week’s end” to run westward and visit the old lady. They never offered to take Lucy with them, and if “Jem” could not go Florence went alone. As for Lucy, she often yearned for those associations with her old easy girlish life which she would have found in Mrs. Bray’s presence. Such associations help to uphold our sense of identity, and often comfort us by revealing our own growth. They keep us tender, too, and tolerant, reviving the consciousness of what we were ourselves before we learned bitter lessons which may not yet have come to others. Also they strengthen us by revealing that not even to regain our old careless joys could we willingly be again our old careless selves. It is the “look backward” which best spurs us to go forward. But Lucy could not afford any “unnecessaries” of leisure or railway travel. She turned at once to her life of steady labour, knowing that she must be henceforth a working woman, not for any temporary exigency, but as part of the natural and persistent order of things. Even thus she had problems to solve. Her earned income, more or less uncertain, was not adequate for the reliable upkeep of the home of her married life. Nor could the demands upon it grow less, since Hugh’s education and start in life had to be taken into account. Lucy could not yet give up all hope of her husband’s return. But her sweet, sane nature speedily realised that whatever hopes she might secretly cherish, she must nevertheless act as though Charlie had indeed “sailed for that other shore” whence he “could not come back to her.” Yet these secret hopes made it very hard to contemplate the surrender of the home Charlie and she had made together—the sale of the leasehold, the dispersion and shrinkage of the household gods. These seemed almost sacred now when they might be all that remained of the old life. The Brands warmly advocated giving up the house and selling off the furniture. “It may not bring in much,” Florence said airily, “but what it does Jem will get well invested in some paying concern. Then you and the boy can board with somebody. You may do that moderately enough, for people who are glad to take boarders can often be screwed down to low terms. Then apart from that definite outlay, you’ll have whatever you can earn for yourself, and you’ll have no more worry with housekeeping. Many would envy such a lot. You see there are compensations in all things.”