somewhat conciliated by the alarmed aspect of the butler, who did not know whether to resist or what to do, he changed his mind. “I don’t want to startle my father,” he said; “say Mr. Randolph Musgrave has arrived.” “I beg your pardon humbly, sir,” cried Eastwood. “No, no, it was not your fault.” Randolph replied. It was not the servant’s fault; but it was _their_ fault who had made his home a place of disgrace, and no longer a fit home for him. The Squire was seated among his books, feeling the drowsy influence of the afternoon. He had no Monograph to support his soul, and no better occupation than to rummage dully through the records of antiquity, cheered up and enlivened if he found something to reply to in _Notes and Queries_, but otherwise living a heavy kind of half-animate life. When the critiques and the letters about that Monograph had ended, what a blank there was! and no other work was at hand to make up, or to tempt him to further exertions. The corner of land that he desired to attain had been bought, and had given him pleasure; but after a while his eyes were satisfied with the contemplation, and his mind almost satisfied with the calculation, of so many additional acres added to the property. The sweetness of it lay in the thought that the property was growing, that there was sufficient elasticity in the family income to make the acquisition of even a little bit of land possible. The Squire thought this was the fruit of his own self-denial, and it gave him that glow of conscious virtue which was once supposed to be the appropriate and unfailing reward of good actions, till conscious virtue went out of fashion. This was sweet; and it was sweet to go and look at the new fields which restored the old boundary of the Penninghame estate in that direction; but such gratifications cease to be sustaining to life after a time. And Mr. Musgrave was dull sitting among his books; the sounds were in his ears which he was always hearing now--the far-off ring of voices that made him sensible of those inmates in his house whom he never noticed, who were to him as if they did not exist. When the mind is not very closely occupied, sounds thus heard in the house come strangely across the quiescent spirit of the solitary. Voices beloved are as music, are as sunshine, conveying a sense of happiness and soft exhilaration. Hearing them far off, though beyond the reach of hearing, so to speak, does not the very distant sound, the tone of love in them, make work sweet and the air warm, softening everything round the recluse? But these were not voices beloved. The old man listened to them--or rather, not permitting himself to listen, _heard_ them acutely through the mist of a separation which he did not choose to overcome. They were like something from another world, voices in the air, inarticulate, mysterious, known yet unknown. He turned the leaves idly when these strange suggestions came to him in his solitude; he had