ung
cock-a-doodles. They marries and lives in lugsury--gives their wives
di'monds, and motor-cars, and nothin' ain't too good for them,--then
pop! off they goes, and _we_ comes in! Sich is life!"

"Godfrey Stubbs was a very decent feller;" protested the other, biting
the top of his pencil with a meditative air. "He was misfort'nate,
that's all."

"Humph? Misfort'nate? Yes, I've heard it called that before. Stubbs
ain't the first by a long chalk whose sticks I've had to make a list of
because of his dying--or living--misfort'nate. Who's the missus?"

"Can't say. There she goes!"--suddenly; and with one accord both stepped
to the large French window which stood open, and stared across the lawn.
"Just a mere slip of a thing," murmured Joe Mills, under his breath,
"'bout my Milly's age, poor lass!"

"Lucky there's no kids," quoth his companion, bluntly; "and, 'Poor lass'
or no, we've got our work to do. Where had we got to now? Look sharp,
and let's clear out of this before she comes back,"--and spurred to
activity by the suggestion, the interlude came to an end forthwith.

They need not have hurried; Leonore was not going to interrupt again.
She had come to take a last look round, as she was not now dwelling
there; but the sight just witnessed was enough to preclude any desire
for further investigation, and she almost ran across the threshold which
she was never more to enter.

It may be wondered at that none of her own people were with the hapless
girl at such a moment--but a few words will explain this. A very few
days before Godfrey Stubbs' sudden death, an outbreak of influenza,
which was rife in the neighbourhood, had taken place at Boldero Abbey;
and to the intense vexation of the general, he found himself laid by the
heels, when it was above all things necessary and desirable that he
should appear, clad in the full panoply of woe, at the funeral of his
son-in-law.

He would go, he was sure he could go,--and he rose from his bed and
tried, only to totter, trembling, back into it again.

Then he ordered up Sue, and sent messages to the younger ones. When it
appeared that all were either sick or sickening, and that the doctor's
orders were peremptory, he was made so much worse himself by wrathful
impotence, that thereafter all was easy, and by the time the epidemic
had abated, Leonore was no longer in her own house.

She was still, however, to her father's view a personage, and as such to
be treated. Message