d recalled what his sister had told him about the Bolderos that
morning at breakfast. Emily was his purveyor of news, and his fondness
for her made him often affect an interest in it which he did not feel.
It might be an effort to say "Ah! Indeed?" and follow on with a proper
question or comment when his thoughts were wandering; but he never
failed to try, and from trying faithfully for many years, he had finally
attained some measure of success.

Occasionally, also, Emily's chit-chat bore fruit; the good man had the
scent of a sleuth-hound for any event which bore, however remotely, on
his life's object; and though he might now have been secretly amused by
his sister's excitement over what to him was a very ordinary
circumstance, a single remark in connection with it arrested his
coffee-cup on its way to his lips.

"To be sure I had forgotten that," he murmured.

"Forgotten that Leonore made a wealthy marriage, my dear Eustace? Why,
it is only three years ago, and we were all full of it."

"Then I suppose she----" he paused and mused.

"You may be sure she brings back her money with her," nodded Emily
cheerfully. "Poor dear child, it's all she has left. So sad to be
widowed so young, is it not? I don't think you seem quite to take in how
sad it is, Eustace," and she cast a gentle look of reproach.

The rector put down his cup and stirred its contents thoughtfully,
debating the question within himself. He was so accustomed to sad cases
that perhaps--well, perhaps it was as she said: certainly it had not
occurred to him to bestow the same pity on a young girl, bereaved
indeed, but with a good home to come back to, as he did on Peggy, the
ploughman's wife, for instance--that valiant Peggy who, with her ten
children, was suddenly reduced from comparative affluence to naked
poverty, by the death of the bread-winner of the family.

Peggy was getting on in years, and her strength was not what it had
been. She had toiled and moiled, and brought up her boys and girls in a
way that won her pastor's heart. His smile would be its kindest, his
shake of the hand its heartiest when he entered the ploughman's hut; and
there were others;--there was the case of Widow Barnaby whose only son
had just returned upon her hands, maimed for life, after starting out
into the world a fine, strapping youngster, the best lad in the village,
only a year before! No, he had not classed the calamity which had
befallen pretty little Leonore Bold