with a terrible incentive for saving others from the pitfall which had engulfed this self-sufficient and worldly minded young woman. His zeal communicated itself to Mrs. Wilson--for he did not fail in due manifestation of personal sympathy--and when he left her at the end of a visit of two hours her favorite impulse toward social reform was already acting as a palliative to her anguish and disappointment as a mother. A few days later her brother informed her that Paul's wife had refused to wait the three years necessary to entitle the one or other of them to institute dignified divorce proceedings, on the ground of desertion, in the State where her husband had his domicile, and that she had gone to Nebraska to pursue her own remedy. Mr. Howard, though obviously disgusted, finally dismissed the matter with a sweep of his hand, and the utterance, "I guess, on the whole, the sooner he is rid of her the better." But this apothegm, which for a second time did him service, only increased his sister's dejection. The disgrace of the family seemed to stare her in the face more potently than ever. Following within a few weeks of this information came the disclosures in the newspapers of the double divorce with their sensational innuendoes as to what had occurred at Newport. For three days she kept the house, too sick at heart to attempt to simulate in public the veneer of an unruffled countenance. Then she visited Gordon Perry's office, and consulted him as to the feasibility of putting some legal obstacle in the way of her daughter's procedure; but learned from him, as she had feared, that she was powerless. When she resumed her ordinary avocations she feared lest the shame she felt should mantle her cheek and impair the varnish of well-bred serenity. It was while she was in this frame of mind that she was accosted by Loretta, and the effect of the bald remarks was as though someone had invaded her bosom with a rude cold hand. They froze her to the marrow, and while, on second thought, she ascribed the liberty to ignorance, she felt disappointed at the evolution of her ward. Such lack of delicacy, such inability to appreciate the vested rights of the soul argued ill for Loretta's progress in refinement. There was no second invasion of Mrs. Wilson's privacy. It seemed to her, as the days passed, that she had been through a crushing illness, and she felt the mental lassitude of slow convalescence. The receipt of Mrs. Stuart's brief letter informing her that she had been injured and was in need of counsel was a sudden reminder that she had allowed her personal sorrow to render her selfishly heedless of all else. It served as the needed tonic to her system. She swept away the cobwebs of depression from her brain, and with a firm purpose to resume her place in the world despatched forthwith a sympathetic note and two bunches of choice grapes to the invalid, and on the following morning gave orders to her coachman to