endeavors to make the two ends meet, found himself at the latter end of his life with a great fortune and a motherless baby on his hands. The position in both ways was very strange to him. He gave up the school, generously bestowing the good-will, the furniture, and the remaining pupils on young Philip Rainy, the son of a cousin of his wife. He would not give away his child’s money; but he hoped, he said, that he would always be ready to serve an old friend with that which was his own. And then he gave himself up to the charge of Lucy’s fortune. One thing that was to the credit of John Trevor, all Farafield said, was that he never gave himself any airs or committed any extravagances. He lived on the same income with which his wife and he had begun life, before the great windfalls came which made their little daughter one of the richest heiresses in England. He might have bought himself a great house, set up a carriage, tried to make his way into society. But he did none of these things. He lived on in the old way, without fuss or show, nursed Lucy’s fortune and rolled it into ever-increasing bulk like a snow-ball, and had Lucy nursed as best he might with no woman to help him. How it was that in this respectable and right-minded career there should have occurred the interval of folly in which little Jock came into the world, who can tell? The second Mrs. Trevor was a good woman enough, and had acted for some years as his housekeeper and the superintendent of Lucy’s health and comfort--a comely person, too, which perhaps had something to do with it. But nobody ever dwelt upon this moment of aberration in old Trevor’s life, for his second wife died as his first wife had done, and there would have been an end of the incident but for little Jock. And nobody made much account of him. When the second Mrs. Trevor died, he gave up housekeeping. Perhaps he was afraid of other risks that might attend him in the same way. When a man is a widower for the second time it is impossible to say what Bluebeard career he may not rush into. In this, as in so many other things, _il n’y a que le premier pas qui coûte_. After that there is no telling to what lengths you may go. So Trevor wisely withdrew from all hazards. He looked about him carefully, and fixed upon Mrs. Ford, who was a cousin of his first wife. Ford was just then beginning to sigh and make comparisons between his own lot and that of his employer, who was his contemporary, and had just retired with, if not a fortune, at least a competency. “Whereas I shall have to slave on to the end,” Ford said. One evening, however, his wife came out to meet him in high excitement to tell him what had happened. “He will buy the lease for us,” she said, “and set us up, and then he will take our lodgings. I never should have thought old Trevor would be so liberal; but I suppose it is for poor Lucilla’s sake.”