To this she made no reply, but after a while sat down beside him, endeavouring to turn his thoughts to other subjects. ‘I have settled everything I can for you,’ she said, ‘it will not be so comfortable as in mother’s time. She was very comfortable, without having any method in particular or settled ways. If I don’t make any fuss, yet I feel that all the same. But after a while you’ll fall into the new method. Sarah’s a good girl. She will do everything for you that she knows. And new customs creep up, and you will get on more comfortably than you think. The only question that there is any anxiety about is the boy.’ ‘You had better take him back, Emily, into your own hands.’ ‘How can I do that?’ Her face changed a little out of its fixed gravity and calm. ‘You can’t undo ten years in a day. By all the habits of his mind he’s your boy. It was a risk, but you took it. I ought to have thought, but I didn’t then, that in the course of nature I should most probably live the longest, and that, before he was fully set out in the world, you might----’ She paused, reflecting that this was the very contrary of what she had said a few minutes before. ‘What?’ he said, fretfully. ‘If you think that in consequence of what has happened I will make any change--of any kind--you are much mistaken, Emily. I’ll neither form new ties, nor change in any way. Half is left to you and half to him, as we always settled, and there shall be no alteration.’ ‘I was not thinking of that,’ she said, gently; but she did not say any more. It is difficult, unless as a matter of business, to speak to any man of what will happen when he dies, and if he does not care to contemplate that idea it is so much the worse. Emily let the subject drop. She had said he might see them all out, which indeed might happen, as such things happen every day; but though she said this she perceived with her experienced eyes that her father was a man unlikely to live long. The loss of the companion of his life, who had been his prop, though his mind had never been sensible to the fact, was not a thing likely to be got over so easily as seemed. Though she spoke of Sarah’s faithfulness and the new ways, she had no real faith in the apparent composure with which he had accepted the change in his life. In many ways this was to her a painful conclusion, and hard to face. Something no doubt of natural feeling had survived the long separation, the great difference between her ways of thinking and his. To have that house swept from the face of the earth in which there was always a refuge whatever might happen; and still worse to have on her hands a responsibility from which she had shaken herself free; to have it back again with all its difficulties increased, and every kind of new complication, was a most unwelcome thought. But her mind was a very clear and cool one in its peculiar way, and she foresaw everything that could possibly occur to make her arrangements vain, even while in the