mistress's lap, she never so much as glanced at them, but sat staring with her steely blue eyes straight in front of her; a state of things which, rigorously persisted in, afflicted the butler, on his own statement, with a disease known to him as 'the creeps,' and which was considered generally so uncanny throughout the lower regions, that had not the wages been good and the table liberal, the whole household would have departed in a body. About four o'clock on a dull afternoon in the very early spring, Mrs. Calverley was seated in her drawing-room in that semi-comatose state which inspired her domestics with so much terror. Some excuse, however, was to be made for her not attempting, on the present occasion, to read the book which lay idly in her lap, the time being 'between the lights,' as the phrase goes, when the gathering gloom of light, aided by the ever-present thickness of the London atmosphere, blots out the sun's departing rays before the time recorded in the almanac. It was very seldom, indeed, that Mrs. Calverley suffered her thoughts to dwell upon any incident of her immediately passed life. On what had happened during her girlhood, when she was the spoiled and petted heiress, on certain episodes in the career of jolly George Gurwood, her first husband, in which she had borne a conspicuous part, she was in the habit of bestowing occasional remembrances; but all that concerned her later life she wilfully and deliberately shut out from her mind. And this not from any sting of conscience, for Mrs. Calverley considered herself far too immaculate to be open to any such vulgar, consideration, but, as she said to herself, because everything of that kind was too near to allow her to form an impartial judgment upon it. It chanced, however, that upon this particular day, the deceased John Calverley had been frequently present to his widow's recollection. There was nothing extraordinary in this; it arose from the fact that that very morning, in looking through the contents of an old trunk which had long since been consigned to the lumber-room, Mrs. Calverley had come upon an old fly-blown water-colour drawing of a youth with a falling linen collar, a round jacket, and white-duck trousers, a drawing which bore some faint general resemblance to John even as she remembered him. Pondering over this work of art in a dreamy fashion, Mrs. Calverley found herself wondering whether her late husband's mental condition in youth had been as frank and ingenuous as that to be gathered from his physical portrait; and, secondly, whether she had not either faultily misapprehended or wilfully misconstrued that mental and moral condition even during the time that she had been acquainted with him. Two or three times later in the day her mind had wandered to the same topic, and now, as she sat in the dull drawing-room in the failing light, her thoughts were full on him. It was pleasant, she remembered, though she had not