te. True, Old England is always louting to
the rear, and has to be pricked in the rear and pulled by the neck before
she 's equal to the circumstances around her. But what if his words were
flung at him in turn! Short of 'Lout,' it rang correctly. 'Too late,' we
hope to clip from the end of the sentence likewise. We have then, if you
stress it--'comes to a knowledge of his wants;--a fair example of the
creatures men are; the greatest of men; who have to learn from the loss
of the woman--or a fear of the loss--how much they really do love her.

Well, and she may learn the same or something sufficiently like it, if
she 's caught in time, called to her face, Countess of Ormont,
sister-in-law, and smoothed, petted, made believe she 's now understood
and won't be questioned on a single particular--in fact, she marches back
in a sort of triumph; and all the past in a cupboard, locked up, without
further inquiry.

Her brother Rowsley's revealed human appearance of the stricken
man--stricken right into his big heart--precipitated Lady Charlotte's
reflections and urged her to an unavailing fever of haste during the
circuitous drive in moonlight to the port. She alighted at the principal
inn, and was there informed that the packetboat, with a favouring breeze
and tide, had started ten minutes earlier. She summoned the landlord, and
described a lady, as probably one of the passengers: 'Dark, holds herself
up high. Some such lady had dined at the inn on tea, and gone aboard the
boat soon after.

Lady Charlotte burned with the question: Alone? She repressed her
feminine hunger and asked to see the book of visitors. But the lady had
not slept at the inn, so had not been requested to write her name.

The track of the vessel could be seen from the pier, on the line of a bar
of moonlight; and thinking, that the abominable woman, if aboard she was,
had coolly provided herself with a continental passport--or had it done
for two by her accomplice, that Weyburn, before she left London--Lady
Charlotte sent a loathing gaze at the black figure of the boat on the
water, untroubled by any reminder of her share in the conspiracy of
events, which was to be her brother's chastisement to his end.

Years are the teachers of the great rocky natures, whom they round and
sap and pierce in caverns, having them on all sides, and striking deep
inward at moments. There is no resisting the years, if we have a heart,
and a common understanding. They const