d ever possessed precisely those
tones; rich, as if they had once been powerful. Explanations seemed to
be asked for and given, and in a minute he was informed that a lady was
downstairs whom perhaps he would like to see.

'Who is the lady?' Jocelyn asked.

The servant hesitated a little. 'Mrs. Leverre--the mother of the--young
gentleman Miss Avice has run off with.'

'Yes--I'll see her,' said Pierston.

He covered the face of the dead Avice, and descended. 'Leverre,' he said
to himself. His ears had known that name before to-day. It was the name
those travelling Americans he had met in Rome gave the woman he supposed
might be Marcia Bencomb.

A sudden adjusting light burst upon many familiar things at that moment.
He found the visitor in the drawing-room, standing up veiled, the
carriage which had brought her being in waiting at the door. By the dim
light he could see nothing of her features in such circumstances.

'Mr. Pierston?'

'I am Mr. Pierston.'

'You represent the late Mrs. Pierston?'

'I do--though I am not one of the family.'

'I know it.... I am Marcia--after forty years.'

'I was divining as much, Marcia. May the lines have fallen to you in
pleasant places since we last met! But, of all moments of my life, why
do you choose to hunt me up now?'

'Why--I am the step-mother and only relation of the young man your bride
eloped with this morning.'

'I was just guessing that, too, as I came downstairs. But--'

'And I am naturally making inquiries.'

'Yes. Let us take it quietly, and shut the door.'

Marcia sat down. And he learnt that the conjunction of old things and
new was no accident. What Mrs. Pierston had discussed with her nurse and
neighbour as vague intelligence, was now revealed to Jocelyn at first
hand by Marcia herself; how, many years after their separation, and
when she was left poor by the death of her impoverished father, she had
become the wife of that bygone Jersey lover of hers, who wanted a tender
nurse and mother for the infant left him by his first wife recently
deceased; how he had died a few years later, leaving her with the boy,
whom she had brought up at St. Heliers and in Paris, educating him as
well as she could with her limited means, till he became the French
master at a school in Sandbourne; and how, a year ago, she and her son
had got to know Mrs. Pierston and her daughter on their visit to the
island, 'to ascertain,' she added, more deliberately, 'not entirely