sherry-wine when she received a visitor. And he himself would have been proud of his family and contented with his moderate means. He would have taken Archie and May to the saut water, and pointed out to them the opening in the trees and the house upon the knoll with the white colonnade, and Mary would have said with a laugh, “Hoot, your father’s just doited about that white house on the brae.” What a difference, what a wonderful difference! And which would have been best? James Rowland, tenant of Rosmore, with a name known over India, and his money in all manner of lucky investments, and Evelyn Ferrars for his wife, thought of all this with a curious strain of sensation. He was in many respects an imaginative man. He could realise it all as distinctly as if he saw it before him. He knew the kind of man he would himself have been--perhaps a better man than he was now--a straightforward, honourable man, limited in his horizon, but as trustworthy, as honest and true as a man could be. And he would have known all the real good there was in his children then, and they would have been free of the vulgarities and meanness they had acquired by their false position and mistaken training. It was very startling to think how different, how altered everything might have been. Was he thankful that poor Mary had died? That which had been such a blow to him, driving him out of the country, had been the foundation of all his fortune. It had been the most important event, the turning point in his life. He would never have seen Evelyn, or would have contemplated her afar off as a fine lady, a being to be admired or made light of, but neither understood nor known. How his head went round and round! It was naturally the same subject that suggested itself to his mind when he woke next morning to a new day, a day not like the last in which everything was unassured, but one in which certainty had taken the place of doubt, and he had no longer vague and exciting possibilities to think of, but only how to nourish and adapt the drawbacks which he knew. These cost him thought enough, all the more that the practical part of the matter had now to be determined, and every decision of life was so close to him that the sense of perspective failed, and it was impossible to realise the relative importance of things: how he should manage to satisfy their Aunt Jane, being for the moment of as great consequence as how he should order the course of their future existence.