the poor young fellow went to the bad. It was a good thing he had not done so in this case. And then there came back to him with a shock that strange discovery about the children. Good heavens! to think they were grown up, those little things! The little one was a baby when he had seen her last--his paternal feelings had not been very strongly roused. To put them with their mother’s sister and persuade her to take the full charge of them had been evidently far the best thing to do. She was a good sort of woman who had no children of her own, and they were to her as if they had been her own, which was everything that could be desired. To make sure that they wanted for nothing, and that they should have kindness and affection _par-dessus le marché_ was everything. Even now he did not see what more he could have done. He could not have brought them to India, where for a long time he had no settled place, and where, as everybody knows, children cannot live. He had done on the whole the very best thing for them. But it was startling to think that they were children of eighteen and twenty. Their aunt had sent him their photographs on various occasions, and he had replied in a way which did not displease her by adding on twenty pounds to his next cheque, and beseeching her to have them better dressed. Queer little things they had looked, not like the children at the Station. He had taken it for granted that Jane had not much taste for dress, but that when she grew up, the little one would change that. They got to know by instinct what was becoming as they grew up, those little things: so he was easy in his mind on that subject. Perhaps he had not thought of going home till it came suddenly into his mind, to please Miss Ferrars. Of course that was what would please her most, to have a home in England. She looked like a home in England. She was not a Station lady, full of picnics and dances. A large peaceful country house with fine trees and a beautiful garden, and a green fragrant park in which she could walk with him, that was what looked most like her: and she should have it! If Mr. Rowland had heard of Langley Ferrars which was in the market, I know very well what he would have done. He would have telegraphed to his man of business in London, regardless of expense, directing him to lose not a moment in securing that place. It would have been the most natural thing in the world for him to do. When a man is rich, a man of James Rowland’s mind, giving presents is his easiest way of showing his kindly feelings--and it is not a bad way. And all the explanations in the world would never have got it into his kind head that she would not have liked such a present as that. Her own home restored to her, where she could live at ease, not poorly as her ruined father, poor gentleman, had been compelled to do--but lavishly if she liked, carrying things with a high hand, showing all the neighbours, who perhaps had looked down upon her