nd, for
he was just going to be.'

'Indeed. But who may be my husband, if not he? I am the only Mrs. John
Clark, widow of the late Sergeant-Major of Dragoons, and this is his only
son and heir.'

'How can that be?' faltered Selina, her throat seeming to stick together
as she just began to perceive its possibility. 'He had been--going to
marry me twice--and we were going to New Zealand.'

'Ah!--I remember about you,' returned the legitimate widow calmly and not
unkindly. 'You must be Selina; he spoke of you now and then, and said
that his relations with you would always be a weight on his conscience.
Well; the history of my life with him is soon told. When he came back
from the Crimea he became acquainted with me at my home in the north, and
we were married within a month of first knowing each other.
Unfortunately, after living together a few months, we could not agree;
and after a particularly sharp quarrel, in which, perhaps, I was most in
the wrong--as I don't mind owning here by his graveside--he went away
from me, declaring he would buy his discharge and emigrate to New
Zealand, and never come back to me any more. The next thing I heard was
that he had died suddenly at Mellstock at some low carouse; and as he had
left me in such anger to live no more with me, I wouldn't come down to
his funeral, or do anything in relation to him. 'Twas temper, I know,
but that was the fact. Even if we had parted friends it would have been
a serious expense to travel three hundred miles to get there, for one who
wasn't left so very well off . . . I am sorry I pulled up your ivy-roots;
but that common sort of ivy is considered a weed in my part of the
country.'

December 1899.

A TRYST AT AN ANCIENT EARTH WORK

At one's every step forward it rises higher against the south sky, with
an obtrusive personality that compels the senses to regard it and
consider. The eyes may bend in another direction, but never without the
consciousness of its heavy, high-shouldered presence at its point of
vantage. Across the intervening levels the gale races in a straight line
from the fort, as if breathed out of it hitherward. With the shifting of
the clouds the faces of the steeps vary in colour and in shade, broad
lights appearing where mist and vagueness had prevailed, dissolving in
their turn into melancholy gray, which spreads over and eclipses the
luminous bluffs. In this so-thought immutable spectacle all is change.

O