CHAPTER XVII.

A NEW HOME.

It was just a year since the cold, bleak evening in March when Phillis Maitland sat waiting for her brother's return, little thinking that it was indeed the last time.

Last year in Hamsford, winter was reigning in all its terror of east wind and floating snow-flakes; this year in London, spring was abroad early; too early, indeed, for her to be able long to retain her gentle sway. The lilac-buds were bursting in the squaregardens; the trees in the parks were beginning to think of clothing themselves with green; springflowers were blooming at many drawing-room windows; a poor little caged lark was almost bursting its throat with song, and the glorious sunshine was ruling over all. Parliament had opened, and town was filling daily, if imperceptibly.

It was with strangely-mingled feelings that Phillis found herself in London once more, after an absence of six years. The sights, the sounds, the stirring, mental atmosphere of London were all so unforgotten,

so curiously natural and familiar to her. They made her heart beat with a strange sort of excitement that was half pleasure, half pain. Retrospection and anticipation, grief for the lost but unforgotten past, and bright tender hope for the beautiful and untried future, were mingled and contrasted in her mind.

The mere fact of being in London-a unit in the mighty many, a single pulse in the great throbbing heart of ever-moving life-produces a feeling akin to electrism on some natures, and Phillis' was one of these.

Her life since you saw her last had been uneventful, monotonous, but happy.

On leaving Kreuznach, which they did very shortly after Charlie's departure, the Cornishes had gone to Schwalbach for little Emmie to take the baths. Her sojourn there did her good, but on her governess it worked wonders.

The pure bracing air in which she lived and revelled brought a new life to Phillis. It did for her bodily strength what her new-found happiness did for her mind. She was able to cast behind her some of her hard thoughts about the past, and believe in the promise of the future. Her mind began to recover its tone, and her step its former elasticity; her cheek was bright once more with the bloom of youth. She looked almost like the Phillis Maitland of sixteen, whose beauty had been as much the deli ht of her

father's eyes, as the intelligence of her mind had been the pride of his heart. Even the unsympathetic eyes of Mr. and Miss Cornish noted the change; one ascribed it to the effect of bracing air and recovered health, the other to 'being in love ;' and both were, in a measure, right.

Phillis had told her lover that she wanted time to realise her happiness;' that time she found at Schwalbach, and there was not a spot of ground which she visited in her daily rambles which was not connected in her mind with some thought of him. The place became in some sort sacred to her fancy; its breezy slopes, its autumn-tinted woods, all were beautiful, and fraught with a tender association to her, for here she had learnt-had dared to be happy.

Mrs. Cornish was unfeignedly sorry to part with Miss Maitland. Emmie would never be so well or so happy with another governess, and if it had not been for the peculiar circumstances which unfortunately obliged them to part, she would have been only too glad to retain Miss Maitland's services at home. She said no word about their probable reunion as mother and daughter-in-law; the future would take care of itself,' and she only 'hoped that Miss Maitland would occasionally write to poor little Emmie, who was broken-hearted at losing her.'

And Phillis, too, felt regretful at parting with the Cornishes, uncongenial as they were to herself, for it

made the silence between her and her lover even more unbroken, to lose sight of his family.

To do Mrs. Cornish justice, she would not allow Phillis to leave her, without securing for her a comfortable situation as companion and amanuensis to an old lady. Mrs. Lamb was a widow, tolerably wealthy, and childless, and nearly blind; and she offered a home and a liberal salary to any young lady who had the necessary qualifications to enable her to write her patroness's letters, keep her accounts, help her in her household arrangements, and, in fact, as near as a stranger could, 'be unto her as a daughter.' To say that she offered a home was no empty sound, for a home Phillis indeed found it; and the six months that they had spent together had served to endear Mrs. Lamb and her young companion very closely to one another. was an uneventful winter that Phillis had spent as sole companion to a quiet and rather simple-minded old lady, in one unvarying round of unexciting occupations; but it was the happiest time she had known since her father's death.

It

The peaceful calm, the feeling of protectedness in her present home was sweet to her sweet as the smooth haven after the tempest-tossed sea, to the halfshipwrecked mariner; and there was a sense of comfortable, almost motherly affection brooding over all, that was inexpressibly soothing to her.

It pleased and touched her to be called 'my dear child' by a kind old voice, to be bidden not to stay

out of doors when it began to grow dusk, to be reminded to be sure and put her candle safely out at night; after having been so long the guardian, the protector of others, how strange, and yet how sweetly familiar it was to be watched over, and kindly thought for, instead.

The very simplicity of her daily occupations, which interested, without causing her to exert her mind, all tended to her good.

She had thought so much, perplexed her intellect, and clouded her soul so darkly-with passionate questionings and yearning cries for knowledge about the mysteries of this world and the next-in the long solitary hours at Hamsford, that a soreness, a bitterness had been left behind, which only repose of mind and absence of acute thought could cure. That repose she now had. Above all she was living with a great joy, and her heart was like a singing bird in its glad hopes, its tender happy thoughts. She had her dark hours it is true, when the sadness which had been hers so long seemed to pursue and overtake her-when the future which she had pictured to herself seemed to her morbid fancy too bright, too impossible to be realised by her; but these hours passed, and became less and less frequent as her mind regained its healthy tone, and her real nature reasserted itself once more.

Mrs. Lamb had moved to London for three months -her annual custom; though to one who led a life as quiet and retired as hers, it might naturally seem a