confidential solicitor in London, a man to whom the whole story had long been known. And I do not think Richard Ross had sound sleep that night. The discovery excited him deeply, but not with any of the pleasure with which a man finds what he has lost, with which a husband might be supposed to discover the traces of his lost wife and child. No; he wanted no tamed tramp to disgrace him with her presence, no successful mechanic-son to shame his family: as they had chosen, so let them remain. He had not even any curiosity, but a kind of instinctive repugnance to his other son. And yet he was pleased with Valentine, and thought of the boy more kindly, because he had been kind to his lost brother. How this paradox should be, I am unable to explain. CHAPTER XXV. “So Mr Pringle is on the other side,” said Mary Percival. “Perhaps it is just as well, considering all things.” “Why should it be just as well?” said Violet, with a spark of fire lighting up her soft eyes. “Is unkindness, and opposition among people who ought to be friends, ever ‘just as well’? You are not like yourself when you say so;” and a colour which was almost angry rose upon Vi’s delicate cheek. “My dear, I have never concealed from you that I want to keep you and Val apart from each other,” said Miss Percival, with an injudicious frankness which I have never been able to understand in so sensible a woman; but the most sensible persons are often foolish on one special point, and this was Mary’s particular weakness. “Why should we be kept apart?” said Violet, with lofty youthful indignation. “Nobody can keep us apart--neither papa’s politics nor anything else outside of ourselves.” “Vi! Vi! I don’t think that is how a girl should speak of a young man.” “Oh, I cannot bear you when you go on about girls and young men!” cried Violet, stamping her small foot in the vehemence of her indignation. “Is it my fault that I am a girl and Val a boy? Must I not be friends with him because of that, a thing we neither of us can help, though I have known him all my life? But we are fast friends,” cried Vi, with magnificent loftiness, her pretty nostrils dilating, her bright eyes flashing upon her companion. “Neither of us thinks for a moment of any such nonsense. We were friends when we were seven years old, and I would not give up my friend, not if he were twenty young men!” “You are a foolish little girl, and I am sorry for you, Vi,” said Mary, shaking her head. “At any rate, because you are fond of Val, that is no reason for being uncivil to me.”