was altogether in a military atmosphere in the Stanhopes’ house, and everybody had been explaining that process by which the sun’s rays are made to communicate messages from one distant army to another. She was stopped with the no on her lips by the flash and radiation through the air of that message. She had not any code of interpretation to note in a moment what it meant. But she paused, almost to her own astonishment; and when she found her voice, it was to ask for a little time to think before she gave her final reply. When a woman does this, it is almost invariably the case that she decides for the suitor, even the doubt being, I suppose, a point in his favour, and increasing a disposition--a bias towards him rather than away from him. Evelyn had, like most other Englishwomen, a lively and wholesome feeling that love alone justified marriage, and that any less motive was a desecration of that tremendous tie. It is an excellent thing for a race that this superstition should exist, and I am far from desiring to see any lower ground accepted as the basis of a connection upon which the purity and character of all other affections depend. But yet when reason is allowed time to speak, there are many other things which may be permitted to have a voice, and a woman may at least be allowed to take into consideration at forty, arguments which at twenty would be indignantly refused a hearing. What Evelyn Ferrars felt as she retired from that interview which had opened to her so many and such extraordinary new suggestions for thought, it is difficult to describe. She had become all at once a sort of battlefield--to keep up the military simile--in which that “No,” which had been her first conception of the situation, stood like a force entrenched and on the defensive, somewhat sullen, holding fast upon the mere fact of its existence, emitting a dull roar of artillery now and then, while the attacking forces scoured the plain in endless evolution, pressing on and on. The first flash of the sun-signal, which she had not been at first able to interpret, turned out to mean a rapid identification of her own position, which was a thing she had not allowed herself to think of, while it was without remedy. It was not what she had anticipated when she ventured in her loneliness to come up country in answer to her friend’s warm invitation. She had come out to Calcutta with her brother, the last survivor of her family after the breaking up of home at her father’s death; and when he too died soon after, cut off by the sudden stroke which ends so many promising careers in India, the despair of the solitary woman left in a strange place with few friends and little money, and nobody to come to her help, had been almost without a gleam of light. And in that emergency the Stanhopes had been very kind. The wife had written imploring her heart-broken friend to come to her, offering her all that the affection of a sister could do to supply her