telling her that whatever she did would be right, whether to stay in town or to set up at once at Rosmore. He was not sure himself that he did not look upon that suggestion of staying in town as a relief and postponement for which he would be grateful. Yet what did a little time matter, one way or another? Sooner or later the step would have to be taken; the permanent household formed. Indeed, he felt that it would be natural for the children to expect that their father should take them to London, and let them see something of the world, which was a suggestion at which he shivered more than ever. Poor Rowland! being only an engineer, though a distinguished one, and a man of the people, though risen to great wealth, and sometimes even objected to in his own person as not a gentleman, it was very hard that he should be thus sensitive to the breeding of his children, and feel their imperfections as keenly as the most accomplished “smart” man could have done. Perhaps had he not married and learned to see through Evelyn’s eyes, this catastrophe might not have happened. And he had been so long parted from the children that there was little real love, only the vague instinct of partiality to counteract the shock: and that instinct of partiality often makes everything worse, giving a double clear-sightedness, and exigence of impossible perfection to the unfortunate parent whose fatherhood is mortifying and miserable to him, not a thing of pride but of shame. These were much too strong words to use--but they were not too strong from Rowland’s point of view. The only comfort he had was in his boy’s eyes, which were like his mother’s. And even that thought was not without a pang, for it thrust upon him the question whether the mother, had she lived, would not have been like Jane. Had it been so, it was evident that Rowland himself would not have been what he was. He would have stayed on in the foundry and become a foreman, and perhaps in course of time would have ascended the social scale to a house in the Sauchiehall Road: and his son would have been a clerk in an office, and he himself would have been very proud to think that Archie had friends who were “students” and was steady, and read papers at the Debating Society. His brain seemed to whirl round as he thought of all that which might have been. It is usually the better things which might have happened to us that we think of under that formula--but there is another side in this, as in all human matters. And when Rowland thought what might have been the natural course of his life had Mary lived, it gave him a giddiness which seemed to suspend all his powers. Would it perhaps have been happier so? He would have been very fond of his children, and proud to think that they were taking a step above himself in the world--and Mary would have grown stout like her sister, and would have had, perhaps, a rustling silken gown like Jane’s, and produced with pride a bottle of port-wine and a bottle of