er bow Errington retreated to say good-morning to his hostess.

"Well, whether your sister-in-law comes or not, I hope we are sure of
your charming self?" said Ormonde.

"Unless I am obliged to parade my boys for their grand-uncle's
inspection, I am sure to honor you."

"Of course everything must give away to _that_. I shall come and inquire
what news soon, if I may?"

"Oh yes; come when you like."

"They are all ready, Mrs. Liddell," remarked her hostess.

Mr. Kirby offered his arm, which was accepted with a smile, and the
little widow sailed away with the sense of riding on the crest of a
wave. The ladies were packed into the carriage, the polite man out of
livery whistled up a hansom for the two gentlemen, and the luncheon
party was over.

It was a weary day to Mrs. Liddell--the dowager Mrs. Liddell, as society
would have called her, only she had no dower. All she had inherited from
her husband was the remnant of his debts, which she had been struggling
for some years to pay off, and the care and maintenance of her boy and
girl, on her own slender funds.

At present the horizon looked very dark, and she almost regretted for
Katherine's sake that she had agreed to make a home for her son's widow
and children. Yet what would have become of them without it?

Partly to rouse herself from her fruitless reflections, partly to
relieve the house-maid, who had been doing some extra scrubbing, Mrs.
Liddell took her little grandsons to Kensington Gardens, and when they
had selected a place to play in she sat down with a book which she had
brought in the vain hope of getting out of herself. But her sight was
soon diverted from the page before her by the visions which came
thronging from the thickly peopled past.

Her life had been a hard continuous fight with difficulty after the
first few years of her wedded existence. She had seen her gay,
pleasure-loving husband change under the iron grasp of untoward
circumstances into a querulous, bitter, disappointed man, rewarding all
her efforts to keep their heads above water by sarcastic complaints of
her narrow stinginess, venting on her the remorseful consciousness,
unacknowledged to himself, that his reverses were the result of his own
reckless extravagance. Perhaps to her true heart the cruelest pain of
all was the gradual dying out, or rather killing out, of the love she
once bore him, the vanishing, one by one, of the illusions she cherished
respecting him, till she s