ty. In each case the worst
dread was unfulfilled, but what remained to be borne required all the
fortitude which they could summon. The Vicar's wife saw one of the
props of the home disabled for life, and Mrs Chester's kind heart was
wrung with anguish at the thought that her child had been the cause of
so much suffering. It seemed a strange dispensation of Providence that
she, the main object of whose life had been to help her fellow-
creatures, should have this burden laid upon her; but she bore it
uncomplainingly, striving to cheer the poor woman whose lot was so much
harder than her own.

Before they parted she broached a scheme which she had been planning in
secret, and, having received a willing consent, bided her opportunity to
lay it before the invalid herself. It came at last one chilly
afternoon, when Evie was laid on a sofa before the fire, as a sign that
convalescence had really begun. The knee was still bound up, as it was
not proposed that she should attempt to walk until the journey home had
been accomplished, and it was on this subject that Evie made her first
remark.

"I suppose," she began, looking at Mrs Chester with the brown eyes
which had grown so pathetic in their gaze in the last few weeks, "I
suppose I can travel now, as soon as it can be arranged. I shall have
to be carried about at each of the changes, and it must be planned ahead
in this busy season. I must speak to Miss Bruce, and ask her what I had
better do."

Mrs Chester bent forward and poked the fire in a flurried, embarrassed
manner; she knitted her brows, and her rosy face grew a shade deeper in
colour.

"Er--yes," she assented vaguely. "Of course; but Evie, dear, I have
been waiting to talk to you about something which has been very much on
my mind lately. We are leaving on Thursday, Rhoda and I, and are having
a through carriage and every possible appliance to make the journey
easy, and I thought that it would be so much simpler for you, dear, to
travel with us, and spend a few weeks at the Chase before going home!"

Evie smiled, with the languid courtesy with which an invalid listens to
an impossible proposition.

"It is very kind of you," she said. "Some day I shall be glad to come,
but not at present, thank you. I am not well enough to pay visits."

"But my child, it would not be like an ordinary visit; you should do
exactly as you would in your own home--stay in bed, or get up, as you
pleased, and make out yo