never hoped for this! Guy, O Guy, to
think it should all come right at last!"

But Guy was wringing his brother's hand, with bright tears standing in
his eyes, and quite unable to reply.

"And this is the baby, May? The wonderful baby you wrote me so much
about," Mr. Rupert Thetford said. "A noble little fellow, upon my word;
and a Thetford from top to toe. Am I in season to be godfather?"

"Just in season. The name was to have been Rupert in any case, but a
moment ago I was scolding frightfully, because you had not answered my
letter, little dreaming you were coming to answer in person. And Aileen
too! Oh! my dear, my dear, sit down at once and tell me all about it."

Mrs. Thetford smiles at the old impetuosity, and in very few words tells
the story of the meeting and the marriage.

"Of course you remain in England?" Sir Guy eagerly asked, when he had
heard the brief _resume_ of those past five years. "Of course Jocyln
Hall is to be headquarters and home?"

"Yes," Rupert says, his eyes for a moment lingering lovingly on his
wife, "Jocyln Hall is home. We have not yet been there; we came at once
here to see the most wonderful baby of modern times--my handsome little
namesake."

"It is just like a fairy tale," is all Lady Thetford can say then; but
late that night, when the reunited friends were in their chambers, she
lifted her golden head off the pillow, and looked at her husband
entering the room. "It's so very odd, Guy," slowly and drowsily, "to
think that, after all, a Rupert Thetford should be _Sir Noel's Heir_."

A DARK CONSPIRACY.

"In love with her--_I_ want to marry her!" cried Tom Maxwell in a fine
fury. "I tell you I hate her, and I hope she may die a miserable,
disappointed, cantankerous old maid!"

Striding up and down the floor, his face flaming, his eyes flashing, his
very coat-tail quivering with rage--a Bengal tiger, robbed of her young,
could not have looked a much more ferocious object. And yet ferocity was
not natural to Tom Maxwell--handsome Tom, whose years were only
two-and-twenty, and who was hot-headed and fiery, and impetuous as it is
in the nature of two-and-twenty to be, but by no means innately savage.
But he had just been jilted, jilted in cold blood; so up and down he
strode, grinding his teeth vindictively, and fulminating anathema
maranathas against his fair deceiver.

"The miserable, heartless jilt! The deceitful, shameless coquette!"
burst out Tom, ferociously. "S