neat packets of foreign letters in the drawer of the rose-wood table, and in the disciplined soul of the woman who sat before it "doing the books." Monday was the day for this. Every day had its special duties: every duty its special hour. While the mother had stayed there had been love to give life to this life that was hardly life at all. Now the mother was gone it sometimes seemed to Dorothea that she had not lived for these fifteen years--and that even the life before had been less life than a dream of it. She sighed. "I'm old," she said, "and I'm growing silly." She put her pen neatly in the inkstand tray: it was an old silver pen, and an old inkstand of Sevres porcelain. Then she went out into the garden by the French window, muffled in jasmine, and found herself face to face with a stranger, a straight well-set-up man of forty or thereabouts, with iron-grey hair and a white moustache. Before his hand had time to reach the Panama hat she knew him, and her heart leaped up and sank sick and trembling. But she said:-- "To whom have I the pleasure--?" The man caught her hands. "Why, Dolly," he said, "don't you know me? I should have known you anywhere." A rose-flush deepened on her face. "It can't be Robert?" "Can't it? And how are you, Dolly? Everything's just the same--By Jove! the very same heliotropes and pansies in the very same border--and the jasmine and the sundial and everything." "They tell me the trees have grown," she said. "I like to think it's all the same. Why didn't you tell me you were coming home? Come in." She led him through the hall with the barometer and the silver-faced clock and the cases of stuffed birds. "I don't know. I wanted to surprise you--and, by George! I've surprised myself. It's beautiful. It's all just as it used to be, Dolly." The tears came into her eyes. No one had called her Dolly since the mother went, whose going had made everything, for ever, other than it used to be. "I'll tell them you're staying for lunch." She got away on that, and stood a moment in the hall, before the stuffed fox with the duck in its mouth, to catch strongly at her lost composure. If anyone had had the right to ask the reason of her agitation, and had asked it, Dorothea would have said that the sudden happening of anything was enough to upset one in whose life nothing ever happened. But no one had the right. She went into the kitchen to give the necessary orders. "Not the mince," she said; "or, stay. Yes, that would do, too. You must cook the fowl that was for to-night's dinner--and Jane can go down to the village for something else for to-night. And salad and raspberries. And I will put out some wine. My cousin, Mr. Courtenay, has come home from India. He will lunch with me."