signs of having been left heart-whole. "Thank God for that!" sighed Helen. "He is not breaking his heart and spoiling his life for nothing. Yes, she does love him, and will wait for him, if I can only use the time!" She read the letter again, this time between the lines, and found proof enough that the invitation to Thorp End was fully as much for Alan's sister as for Bertha's friend; and she was pleased with a hundred tokens of what Bertha, who had never been asked for her "Yes," was too shy to put into plain words. Well, that would soon all come out in talk; but——— "What am I thinking?" Helen suddenly remembered. "What can I do for them at Thorp End? My work must be here."

Helen Reid might work for a century without pushing on Alan's fortunes so far as to make it consistent with his notions of honour to ask an heiress to share them with him. Left to himself, Alan, altogether desperate and heart-broken as she took him to be, might work to the same end for a thousand years. But what might not be done, and done quickly, by Mrs. Gideon Skull ?

When the saving sense of humour is dead, the meanly grotesque will take its room. "Mrs. Gideon Skull!" The name helped the man by becoming the worst part of him. Nothing could possibly be worse about him than his name, which had been identified all her life with his uncle Christopher. She did not imagine for an instant that Alan would approve of the means she took to raise the fortunes of the Reids. But she was her own mistress; she had a right to make her own choice, and a poor man who loved a rich girl could have no stones to throw at a girl who chose to fall in love-yes, she must make up her mind to fall in love-with a rich man. He might not approve her taste: brothers are not bound to admire their brothers-in-law; but they must accept them, and when their brothers help them to the desire of their own hearts, they will accept them. After all, beyond his name and his style of talk, no fair objection could possibly be taken to Gideon. He was a man; and in point of manhood and money, earls' daughters have been known to make worse matches with the approval of the world. It was by marriage that Copleston had come to the Reids in the beginning. And Alan and Helen were not even Reids-the Skulls were of a higher caste than the son and daughter of nobody. "Can I manage to really care about him?" asked Helen. "It will make things so far and far easier if I only can—a little. I suppose I can if I try," thought she who had once said "I would be Queen Cophetua," and was now scheming how best and soonest to catch Gideon Skull because of his ten thousand a year.

There was no need to keep Bertha's letter. That had been written to Queen Cophetua. She tore it up and threw it into the fire-burning her ships behind her.

CHAPTER XIX.

You have pity for the sparrow

When the cloud lies white and deep,
When the day is dark and narrow,
And the world's afraid to sleep,
Fearing frost for heart and marrow,
Hoarding all the life we keep?

Pity not the slave of Nature,

Though the cold hath numbed his tongue :
Frost may come with kinder feature

Than your linnet finds in song

Pity thou the cagèd creature,

Longing when the days are long!

MRS. REID was not yet at the end of the means she had reserved to herself in order to begin the battle. She also had burned her ships -or at least cut herself away from them for seven years; for to play at poverty and not to throw the whole burden of battie upon Alan's shoulders in the fullest and sternest reality would have been the merest child's play. She would not expose herself to the temptation of secretly helping him out of some hard strait, as she might prove weak enough to do if she had kept her communications with her sources of supply open; and the point and glory of her triumph was to be his coming triumphantly out of a real struggle-as real as if he had been born to poverty. She never dreamed that the means she had kept for starting would run out before even the first sign or promise of success, nor did she think so now; for that matter, she did not allow herself to think so. Such a thought would mean fear of failure, and that was to be impossible. This barren, boyish folly of running off to see the soldiers and hear the drums drove her to a stricter economy, if that could be possible. But there was no reason to fear that things would not hold out until he returned, and then the poorer he found them the better.

She had, locked up in her desk, the advance of Alan's wages from the Argus; but these were not to be touched, whatever might happen, until they should be repaid with interest at the end of the seven years. Alan, she knew well enough, would never ask a word about them, and, apart from her plan, she would have been ashamed-she, who had been born a Hoël of Pontargraig, and had

married scarcely, if at all, beneath her-to live on the wages that a newspaper paid a reporter. Her one idea of giving and taking hard blows in the battle of life, and of elbowing and fighting one's way through the crush, was to come, see, and conquer: her notion of ladder-climbing was to make a clear spring over the lower half of the rungs. She had occasion to open her desk when the postman brought Bertha's letter, so that she happened to be out of the way when it arrived, and was undisturbed by the sight of the Hillswick postmark. Indeed, she was too deeply absorbed in her accounts to hear the knock at the door, or she might have hurried down in the hope of another letter from Alan. The time had long gone by for finding any excitement in such reckonings of petty cash for a great purpose, while feeling all the while that nothing but her will prevented each sovereign she dealt with from turning into at least a hundred a year.

But the more she reckoned, the harder became the meeting of both ends. It seemed as if the situation would become something more than serious for want of a number of pounds so few that she might, if she pleased, treat them as of no more account than shillings. It had certainly never occurred to her that she and Helen might have to face the very hardest realities of the battle, such as women alone can feel them. She looked at the notes she had received for Alan. If she used them as a loan, they could still be repaid when the time came, and she would be spared the complication of her scheme by the meanest and most sordid of details. Perhaps the time might come when the use of these bank-notes would become what most people would call an inevitable necessity, and when she would, as a matter of course, go to her desk when she found her purse empty. And that must not be allowed to happen. not disapprove of the source and use what came therefrom.

She could

So, while her purse was not as yet wholly empty, and while to-morrow with its needs was still that to-morrow which is always so far away, she made the notes up into a packet in order to place them where, should she ever come to need them, she would be unable to obtain them without a conscious and deliberate suppression of pride -that is to say, where they would be as safe from her as if she had spent them. An account in Lombard Street was still lingering in her name, unknown to her son or daughter, and by adding these notes to it she would put them beyond the reach of any chance mood of weakness such as the extremity of some day's pressure might bring upon her. Without seeing whether Helen had returned from her errands, she carried her notes eastward as if her spirit had been a

miser's, so afraid of spending that it would not trust the strength of its own hands. Avarice itself could not have done more than pride.

She paid in Alan's notes over the bank counter and turned homewards, with her mind relieved of the fear of a burden. She had nearly reached her own street when she saw before her her daughter Helen walking by the side of Gideon Skull.

Inconceivable as that bare fact was, it was not all. They were walking slowly, and in earnest talk, and his head was turned and his face bent down towards hers. It might have been a chance meetingit must have been. How could it be anything else, when their whole acquaintance was confined to a single interview? And yet Mrs. Reid's heart sank and trembled as it remembered all at once a hundred nothings-a hundred noughts which, nothing in themselves, became signs of power by grouping themselves after the fact which she saw with her own eyes. Helen was not one towards whom a mother, with a great secret to keep of her own, could find distrust impossible. For all these last months they had for the first time been such close and constant companions as to find out, each for herself, that the other's real life was one in which she had no share, and that a wall stood between them of a nature beyond their guessing. Helen thought her mother hardened and weighed down by the sense of a marriage that had been no marriage, by pride that forbade her to share shame, and by its cruel consequences to her son. Mrs. Reid thought her daughter crushed by adversity like a coward, so that she felt her not worth consideration or confidence in her plans for Alan. But that was a very different thing from finding her almost arm in arm with Gideon Skull, as if she had been some Hillswick shop-girl who had crept out of the house on a false pretence to meet a lover-a lover whom many a Hillswick shop-girl had crept out to meet, if all old tales were true.

For what had Gideon called upon them at all? Why had he been so incomprehensibly and unreasonably friendly towards Alan? Men like Gideon-so much even Mrs. Reid knew-do not go among the fallen to pick up friends, or waste their good offices upon those who can do nothing in return. Why had he called a second time within two days? Why had her presence confused his looks and his words, and driven him out of the house as if he were afraid of an elderly woman and a girl? In what way but one was she to read the speech of his eyes during his visit ; and what could have been the meaning of Helen's changes of colour and unnatural silence in his presence, and her feeble excuses for him when his back was turned? It did not seem impossible to her that a girl should be led

astray by Gideon. She herself did more than justice to his pluck, his strength, and his triumph in the battle of life which had gone far to inspire her with her scheme for Alan. She did not underrate his old character with respect to women; he had been, ever since her marriage, her sole living type of the great, bold, bad man, whom she feared far too much to despise; and she had a sort of lingering mistrust that she had done wrong to warn Helen against him on so dangerously fascinating a ground. Gentleman or not, how could Mrs. Reid tell what arts and forces he might not have wherewith to subdue girls? Women know better than to think that ladies, though their own daughters, are made of different flesh or blood from the rank and file of Hillswick or of anywhere. She would sooner have seen Helen walking with a lion than with Gideon Skull. No wonder her heart sank and grew cold. Such meetings as this are never accidents, however they may happen; and the mere thought or dream of Helen -Helen, out of all the world !-being in the streets with Gideon Skull; it must be true, because it could never have entered her head to dream.

She would have given anything for the power to go near enough to them to catch one least word; she could only keep them in sight, and she noticed they remained together, as if unwilling to part, till Helen reached the last turning that would lead her home. Why did not Gideon see her to her door, not a hundred steps away? And he held her hand for a whole half-second longer than there was need. She waited till Helen was well indoors before following her, and the time she gave herself for her suspicions to cool in gave them ample time to grow and to combine themselves. She went indoors, and found Helen, still in her hat and cloak, throwing scraps of paper into the fire. It was a strange occupation; at least, all that was in her mother's heart made it strange.

Still, it might have been nothing but an accident, after all. Even in London people may fall across one another without intention; and it was one thing to doubt her own daughter with her eyes and another with her heart. Helen could not surely have waited till she was a woman to begin secret-keeping. So her mother said nothing beyond some common word in order that Helen might herself tell her, without asking, of this chance meeting, for such it must really have been, after all; though hardly even by chance could it have happened at Copleston.

But Helen only answered with the commonest of words. None but the very commonest had passed for a long time between these two.