"I beg your pardon," she said coldly; "our acquaintance is at an end." "End! No. I have come to my senses. It must not--it shall not be." "It must and shall, Mr Graves," she said, turning away. "For Heaven's sake, why?" he whispered excitedly, as she was going. "Times are changed, sir. I am only a schoolmistress now." Just then Mr Chute entered with the boys, and he turned white as he saw the stranger there. CHAPTER THREE. HAZEL'S TROUBLES. About a year and a half before Hazel Thorne had the task of conducting her school for the first time to Plumton church, she was in her home at Kensington, leading the every-day pleasant life of the daughter of a stockbroker, who was reputed among his friends as being "warm," that being the appropriate term for a man who is said to have a pretty good store of money well invested in solid securities. "Fred Thorne will buy mining shares for you, or shares in any bubble that is popular at the time; but catch him putting his coin in anything doubtful." That is what people said; and as he had a good home at Kensington, and gave nice, quiet little dinners, he and his were pretty well courted. "Well, yes, I don't mind, Archy," said old Graves, the wholesale cork merchant of Tower Hill. "Hazel Thorne is a very nice girl--very pretty and ladylike, so I suppose we must swallow the mother for her sake." The boa-constrictor-like proposition was naturally enough taken by Archibald Graves in its slango-metaphorical sense, and slango-metaphorically Mrs Frederick Thorne was swallowed by the whole of the Graves family, and she did not agree with them. For Mrs Thorne was not a pleasant woman. Tall, handsome, and thoroughly ladylike in appearance, she was very proud of having been considered a beauty, and was not above reminding her husband of the fact that she might have married So-and-so and What's-his-name, and You-know-whom, all of which gentlemen could have placed her in a better position than that she occupied; and as she grew older these references were more frequent. Each child she had seemed to be looked upon by her as a fresh grievance--a new cause for tears, and tears she accordingly shed to an extent that might have made any one fancy this was the reason why the Thorne home generally seemed damp and chilly, till Hazel entered the room like so much sunshine, when the chill immediately passed away. Gradually growing weaker in act and speech, the unfortunate woman received a shock which completed the change that had been gradually heretofore advancing, for Fred Thorne--handsome, bright, cheery, and ever ready to laugh at mamma's doldrums, as he called them--went out as usual one morning to the City, saying that he should be back a little earlier to dinner that day, as he had stalls for the opera. "I'll come back through Covent Garden, Hazel, and bring you a bouquet," he cried merrily.