but I can't help agreeing with him that it would be best if you could look upon him as dead."

Margaret said very little more. It was not in her power to do as she was advised, though doubtless it might be expedient to make a pretence at doing so. The total failure of her life was very evident to her; but that did not make it any easier to forget the past and start afresh. "What am I to do now?" she ejaculated to herself, after Hugh had left her; and all day long this question kept echoing and re-echoing itself in a tired brain. What was she to do what was she to do?

By way of practical answer came a kind letter from Tom Stanniforth, who had heard something of her projects, entreating her to come down to Longbourne, and start a poor bachelor in the way of housekeeping and dealing with the tyrannical Mrs. Prosser, who remained in charge of the establishment. It might be a convenience to Margaret, he said, to be in her own house for a time before going abroad, and it would be a true charity to him if she would give him a few directions.

A somewhat similar invitation reached Colonel Kenyon, who was begged to understand that his right to make himself at home at Longbourne remained the same, although the house had passed out of the hands of one member of the Stanniforth family into the temporary occupancy of another.

It thus came to pass that, in the early days of August, very nearly the same party assembled round the Longbourne dinner-table as had met there a year before; for Mrs. Winnington and Edith had been induced, without much pressing, to avail themselves of Mr. Stanniforth's hospitality. There was only one absentee, and probably only one person missed him. Walter did say one evening that he wished poor old Philip could be there to keep them alive; but this remark was received with such emphatic silence that it was not repeated; and in truth, so far as he himself was concerned, Walter did not feel that the society in which he spent the greater part of his time left anything to be desired.

As the result of many family conclaves, it had been finally decided that Margaret was to engage a companion to accompany her to Switzerland, whither Hugh, whom a step in rank had deprived of the command of his battery and of all present employment, was likewise to travel with her. An advertisement was accordingly put in the papers, which had the effect of bringing numerous singular-looking persons down to Crayminster to be interviewed by Mrs. Winnington, and promptly dismissed as altogether unsuitable. Margaret was beginning to despair, when an excellent and unexpected substitute for a companion presented herself in the person of Miss Brune.

Nellie had been anything but pleased by Mr. Stanniforth's appearance as tenant of Longbourne; and she had thought fit to give him a very cool reception the first time that he walked over to Broom Leas. This, however, had not prevented him from calling again the next day, and the next, and every day; and his manner had been such as to leave

her in no doubt that it was his intention to repeat ere long the offer which he had made without success upon a previous occasion. Now, Nellie was not ignorant of what had been taking place in London during the past few months, and her belief was that she understood Mr. Stanniforth thoroughly. He would have been glad to marry Edith if Walter had not interfered. Failing Edith, he would now be willing enough to marry her; and, failing her, he would have no objection, she supposed, to marrying somebody else. One could not be exactly angry with the man, since it was evident that he really meant no offence; but at the same time it was very disagreeable to be annoyed by the preliminary courtship in which he chose to indulge; and as there was apparently no hope of making him understand the futility of that process, the only thing to be done seemed to be to run away from him. Nellie, therefore, had decided upon paying a long visit to her aunt Elizabeth, an ancient dame who dwelt far away in the west of England, and it was without any idea of being taken at her word that she remarked one morning to Mrs. Stanniforth, "Ah! I wish you would carry me off to foreign parts with you as your companion. I shouldn't ask for any salary."

Margaret jumped at the suggestion. Probably she was the only person at Longbourne or Broom Leas who was still in the dark as to Mr. Stanniforth's purpose, and she was under the impression that Nellie needed change of scene almost as much as she did herself. Had not her clay-footed idol once been Nellie's idol too? The whole matter was arranged, Mr. Brune's consent had been obtained, and the travellers were off almost before the astounded Tom Stanniforth could draw his breath.

"Looked at in the light of a practical joke, I must acknowledge that this is a great success," he said, in rueful accents, to Edith, who could not help laughing at his discomfiture. "Here am I with a big house on my hands that I don't know what to do with, and I daren't shut it up and go away now. I feel exactly like a man who has taken a moor for the season, and finds, on the morning after his arrival, that all the birds are dead."

"Your bird will come back," said Edith consolingly.

"Yes, but when? And when she does come back, what chance will. there be for me? What am I to think of her going off like this the moment that I appear?"

"I know what I think," answered Edith; "I think you have scared her away. You made too sure of her, and I dare say you let her see it; which is not at all the sort of thing that Nellie would like. But never mind. If she had meant to refuse you again, she would not have gone away."

In happy ignorance of the unwarrantable deduction that was being drawn from her retreat, Nellie was at that moment seated in the corner of a French railway carriage, enjoying that exhilaration and sense of freedom which we alone among all nations experience when we leave

our native land. We are generally very glad to get home again, and we complain with much bitterness of our discomforts during our absence; but who does not know the feeling of exultation with which that strip of tumbling grey sea, on the other side of which are all manner of worries and fetters, is left behind? Besides, some of us like to feel the warm sun on our backs for once in a while.

The small party which travelled in a leisurely way from Paris to Dijon, and from Dijon to Bâle, and so up to the regions of purer air, which it was considered desirable that Margaret should breathe, grumbled at nothing-not even at the antiquated French railway system, which delights to throw stumbling-blocks in the path of leisurely travellers, nor at the horde of objectionable compatriots who jostled them at every halting-place. Nor did any of them express a wish to return home. The subject of home was, indeed, but little touched upon between them, and the names of those whom they had left there were seldom on their lips. It would not have been easy to speak of one without mentioning others, whose recent proceedings, it was felt, were best not alluded to. Letters reached them from time to time-letters from Longbourne and from Homburg; and one morning there came a newspaper containing an account of the nuptials of Signora Tommasini and an elaborate description of the bride's dress. Over this Margaret shed a few tears; but she was careful to conceal both the tears and the newspaper from her companions. They left her a good deal to herself, having discovered that that was what she liked best; and on sunny mornings, when Hugh was stretching his long legs in rambles over the hills and far away, and when Nellie had started on an excursion with some of the acquaintances who are quite sure to be met with in every hole and corner of Switzerland in the month of August, she would sit for hours in the shade, gazing at white threads of distant waterfalls, at slopes shaggy with the dark pines, at silver mists curling among the rocks and snow-fields above them-and thinking, thinking.

In that silence and peace and solitude her wounds were gradually healing over-or so she believed. Long before, in London, she had realised the mistakes of her life; but these were no longer so painful to her that she could not bear to face them. It was best to recognise the truth. She supposed that her mother and Philip were rather selfish people. Hugh evidently thought so; and Hugh, who was much better and wiser than she, was always right. But when this was admitted, what more was there to be said, except that she might have spared herself some pain if she had admitted it a little sooner? To one of them, at least, she could not accuse herself of having done any harm; while she had so greatly injured the other by her foolish fondness that she had assuredly no right whatever to complain of him for turning away from her now. And if there was not much comfort in the latter reflection, she persuaded herself that there was-which is very nearly the same thing. Some comfort also she derived from the conviction that

her troubles had taught her to appreciate the one faithful friend whose faithfulness and friendship she had always accepted too much as a matter of course, and whose gentle attempts to open her eyes she had so often resented. Poor Hugh! she had never liked hitherto to think of that offer of marriage that he had made her a year before, but now she did not mind looking back upon it. Could it be true, she wondered, that he had loved her, as he said, before Jack had come? Probably it was not quite true; for men always said that sort of thing, and Hugh had evidently put all thought of the subject away from him. She was half sorry that he should be consoled so soon; and yet she could hardly have wished it to be otherwise, for she was very certain that she could never have married him.

Hugh, meanwhile, was biding his time. He understood, to some extent, the gradual awakening process through which Margaret was passing; and, like a sensible man, he took long walks, and allowed Nature to do her own work in her own way. One day he took it into his head that he would like to go up the Finsteraarhorn; and during the night of his absence a terrific thunderstorm broke over the higher peaks, insomuch that Margaret, who could get no sleep for thinking of the perils to which the adventurous climber might be exposed, knocked Nellie at one o'clock in the morning to take her opinion as to the advisability of despatching a search party across the glacier. On the following evening, however, Hugh came limping back, having triumphantly achieved his object, and having met with no worse disaster than a smart blow on the shin from a falling stone; which little inconvenience was more than compensated for by Margaret's expressions of compassion and concern.

up

"You must not go up any more mountains," she said decisively; "it is too dangerous, and you ought not to risk your life in that foolish way. What would become of me if you were to tumble over a precipice and break your neck?"

"Are you beginning to think of yourself at last?" asked Hugh with a smile.

"Hush!" she answered; "you know very well that I have always thought of myself. But you will take care, won't you? I haven't so many friends that I can afford to lose one."

Hugh promised that he would be caution itself for the future; but after that day Mrs. Stanniforth became restless and anxious to descend to a lower level of habitation. She had had enough of the mountains, she said; they were far more beautiful when seen from a distance. And it was getting too late in the year to linger in such high quarters; and the food was bad; and it was so miserably uncomfortable when it rained—and in short she would give her companions no peace until they had consented to go down into the heat and civilisation of Geneva.

But Geneva evidently would not do for more than a day or two, and it was soon agreed that a move should be made to Ouchy. This

resolution was arrived at on the quay, whither our three friends had strolled out one evening after dinner; and while Hugh was pointing to the place where Mont Blanc ought to have been visible, a cheery and familiar voice called out behind them, "So here you are! What a happy chance that I should have thought of taking a walk this evening! I meant to have started for the Aeggischhorn, the first thing in the morning, after you."

"Tom!" exclaimed Margaret in accents of extreme surprise. "What in the world has brought you to Switzerland?"

"The Paris and Lyons Railway and the habits of a lifetime," answered Mr. Stanniforth; and he might have added, "the friendly counsels of Edith Winnington." "I almost always do go abroad at this time of year, you know," he said.

This might or might not be true; but Margaret could not help concluding, from a certain hilarious self-consciousness on Tom Stanniforth's part, that there was more in this sudden appearance of his than met the eye.

"I do wonder," she said to Hugh, later in the evening, when Nellie had gone to bed and Mr. Stanniforth had likewise retired, after in the most matter-of-course way declaring his intention of accompanying the party to Ouchy-"I do wonder what can have made Tom think of joining us."

"Ah!" said Hugh, "what could it have been?"

"You don't mean to say

Colonel Kenyon began to laugh. "Isn't it an extraordinary thing," said he, "that I, an innocent old bachelor, should always be the one to enlighten a person of your experience as to the love-making that is going on under your nose? Didn't I tell you about young Brune and Edith long ago? And now you see that there was another little affair in progress to which you were blind."

"Oh, but," answered Margaret, anxious to vindicate her character for insight, "I was not altogether blind! That is, I thought at one time that he admired her a good deal; only-—”

"Only you were determined at that time that Miss Brune's affections were to be otherwise engaged-not to speak of his. People have a troublesome way of choosing for themselves, though."

"I am not sure that Nellie has chosen," said Margaret.

"Well, we shall see. We may get some amusement out of watching them-you and I."

CHAPTER XXXVII.

YES AND No.

THE amusement which Colonel Kenyon had anticipated from watching the progress of Tom's suit was furnished to him in as liberal a measure