rd, ascetic view, held much the same language, and Mary
submitted, heart-broken.

Then came a gleam of hope. The brother's care and affection prevailed;
there were rumours of great improvement, of a resumption of work. "Just
two years ago, when you first came here, I was beginning to
believe"--she turned away her head to hide the rise of tears--"that it
might still come right." But after some six or eight months of clerical
work in London fresh trouble developed, lung mischief showed itself, and
the system, undermined by long and deep depression, seemed to capitulate
at once.

"He died last December, at Madeira," said Mary, quietly. "I saw him
before he left England. We wrote to each other almost to the end. He was
quite at peace. This letter here was from the chaplain at Madeira, who
was kind to him, to tell me about his grave."

That was all. It was the sort of story that somehow might have been
expected to belong to Mary Harden--to her round, plaintive face, to her
narrow, refined experience; and she told it in a way eminently
characteristic of her modes of thinking, religious or social, with
old-fashioned or conventional phrases which, whatever might be the case
with other people, had lost none of their bloom or meaning for her.

Marcella's face showed her sympathy. They talked for half an hour, and
at the end of it Mary flung her arms round her companion's neck.

"There!" she said, "now we must not talk any more about it. I am glad I
told you. It was a comfort. And somehow--I don't mean to be unkind; but
I couldn't have told you in the old days--it's wonderful how much better
I like you now than I used to do, though perhaps we don't agree much
better."

Both laughed, though the eyes of both were full of tears.

* * * * *

Presently they were in the village together. As they neared the Hurds'
old cottage, which was now empty and to be pulled down, a sudden look of
disgust crossed Marcella's face.

"Did I tell you my news of Minta Hurd?" she said.

No; Mary had heard nothing. So Marcella told the grotesque and ugly
news, as it seemed to her, which had reached her at Amalfi. Jim Hurd's
widow was to be married again, to the queer lanky "professor of
elocution," with the Italian name and shifty eye, who lodged on the
floor beneath her in Brown's Buildings, and had been wont to come in of
an evening and play comic songs to her and the children. Marcella was
vehemently sure that