from her forehead above the temples and gathered into a small knot at the back. Such an expanse of colourless flesh, such a dull level waste of human features unrelieved by the slightest scintilla of interest or sympathy! In her prim, flat-soled creaking shoes, Mrs. Calverley walked to the window, pushed back the curtains, and looked out down the silent street; then, with a sound which was something between a sigh of despair and a snort of defiance, she returned to the low prie-dieu chair worked in wool, but covered with a shiny, crackling, yellow substance; and arranging her scanty drapery around her, interwove her bony fingers in her lap and sat bolt upright, staring rigidly before her. All the furniture in the room which was capable of being covered up was clad in a uniform of brown holland; the chairs were dressed in pinafores, the big broad sofa had a loosely cut greatcoat of the same material; even the chandeliers had on holland bags. There was no light in the room, but the gas lamps in the street were reflected from the bare shining rosewood table, from the long grand pianoforte, from the huge ormolu clock ticking gravely on the mantelpiece, from the glass shades enshrining wax flowers and fruit, which, made such a poor pretence of being real, and from the old-fashioned handsomely-cut girandoles. By the chair in which Mrs. Calverley was seated stood a frame of Berlin work; in the middle of the hearth-rug before the fireplace--fireless now, and filled with a grim pattern of cut coloured paper--lay a stuffed white-haired dog, intently regarding his tail through his glass eyes, and apparently wondering what he had done in life to be consigned to such a degraded position. A quarter-past six, half-past, a quarter to seven, ring out from the neighbouring church, and at each sound of the chimes Mrs. Calverley rises to her feet, creaks across to the window, looks forth, creaks back again, and resumes her stony position. At length there comes a half-timid ring of the bell, which she recognises at once, straightens her back, and settles herself more rigidly than ever. A few minutes after, the drawing-room door opens, and a voice, the owner of which cannot be seen, is heard saying, "Dear me, all in darkness, Jane?" Mrs. Calverley makes no reply, but rings the bell, and when the servant appears, says to him in a thin acid voice, "You can light the gas, James; and now that your master has come home at last, dinner can be served."