into whose hands it had come, even than the Helen whom it was

answering.

"DEAREST NELLY," she read,-"As if I wasn't glad and thankful to hear from you; as if I had not been wondering what had become of you, and not been afraid to hear! Why didn't you write months and months ago? If I didn't know you, I should have thought you were something more than unkind; but what is the use of friendship if it can't go on trusting through silence even? I do know you, you see; and though I don't see why you should not have writtten to me, I am sure that you know why, and that your reason has been some wild, extravagant, generous, heroic, absurd, incomprehensible, true-hearted reason—just like you. I'm sure I should love you for it, even though I can't understand, and though I mean never to forgive you for it as long as I don't see you. I wish, dearest Nelly, I had the wit for understanding as well as for trusting. Yes, it did seem to me almost past believing that you-all of you-even you, Nelly, went away without a good-bye, or a word instead of one. I hardly know how to tell you what it made me think. It seemed as if you were too proud to have anything more to do with anybody who knew you before that dreadful time. Only such a thing as that could not be between me and you. I'm glad, with all my heart and soul, to hear it wasn't that-at least with you. As if I haven't been thinking more kindly of you than ever; as if, if I had thought any other way, I should have cared! Then it is true that you have lost everything? I had heard so; but I had been hoping against hope, and nobody seemed to know anything for certain, except that in some strange way Copleston did not belong to you. Nobody seems to know quite why you had to give it up without a trial; but everybody is sure that whatever you did was just and right, and worthy of your father, who was loved and honoured, and is still, in a way that would make you too proud to be proud of anything else under the sun. I wish you could hear how mine speaks of yours. Come and hear it, Nelly. Papa has told me, without a hint or a word from me, to tell you and Mrs. Reid to come to Thorp End and stay here all the time your brother is away—and longer, if you will. You can't want to be by yourselves in London all alone; and it is enough to break my heart when you talk in that way of not being able to do anything you want to. You can do everything you need do, and that is to get into a train and come to Thorp End. I do want you, Nell. There is nobody I care to see since you left; and as for talking, I have not done such a thing since last Easter Eve.

d to be talked to as much as I-and

And I think you want to talk more. Your letter tells me

that, Nelly. Your letter reads as if all sorts of things had been gathering in your heart and turning bitter; and that will not do. Shall I be such a baby as to pretend I don't understand you about Alan? I thought of being one; but no, I don't think I will. I'll be old and grown up enough to tell you this: that if you had never written me one word about him, I should have known what you tell me-that he did whatever he thought was best for others. I wish people would not be so un-selfish, Nelly. He never said a word to me more than any old friend might who had almost grown up with one. I suppose I have no right to mix up what might have been with what might not have been. But if should have said 'Yes' on Easter Eve, and He did not care enough to try me-that's all.

You don't think I 'No' on Easter Day! And why should he?

I never supposed he did; and I assure you, with all my heart, that I don't feel one atom the less his friend than ever because he did not happen to ask me to marry him. It would be rather hard on a man if there was to be nothing between not caring for a girl at all and wanting to spend his whole life in her company. I want a great many people, men and women, to care for me very much; but I couldn't marry them all, and I don't mean or want to marry one of them. No, Nelly, not even Mr. Victor Waldron. I think of your brother as always, even though he might have come to say good-bye to an old playfellow without being afraid of her saying anything to him but 'God bless you!'-as she does now.

"It was you made me think of Mr. Victor Waldron; for, so far from knowing him, I have never even set eyes on him. I believe he is known very well at the 'George' at Hillswick, and that he made a bosom friend of old Grimes, the sexton; but he has never made or received a call from any real people, and the last news of him is that he has gone back to America. And as to Copleston, indeed, Nelly, I have never had the heart to go in sight of the lodge gate, and have always ridden other ways. And so I have no news. For it isn't news, is it, that I want you? You will come, and you will give my dearest love to Mrs. Reid; and if you are a better letter-writer to your brother than you are to your sister, tell him that his sister Bertha thinks just as kindly of him as his sister Helen. Say 'Yes' by return of post, and come by the next train.

"Your loving
"BERTHA."

When she had finished the letter, Helen felt that even Bertha herself was a little changed. These airs of wisdom and resignation and dignity looked much more like the scar of a wound than the

"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 think"What can I do for them at ing?" Helen suddenly remembered.

signs of having been left heart-whole.

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 Left to himself, Alan, to ask an heiress to share them with him.

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 He might must make up her mind to fall in love—with a rich man.

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 slie 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. She could not disapprove of the source and use what came therefrom.

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