much laughing and chatter and noise that the two
little girls on either side of Milly Eddington felt her hands turn
ice-cold in theirs, and slowly slip from their grasp. The next instant
she had fallen to the floor between them.

The doctor, luckily on the spot, attending to the baby-brother, was
with her in two minutes. There was nothing to be done. She was dead.

She had been the loveliest and the gayest there, laughing her pretty,
happy laugh, babbling with the rest. Several of the elder guests, it
was afterwards found, had been looking at the child and listening to
her, when all at once she had become silent, had sunk backwards, and
died.

So much they who looked on had seen, but nothing more.

Her mother, standing above, in the shadow of the corridor, and looking
down upon the brightly-lit hall below, had seen this--

She had seen the figure of her first husband--the smile upon his face
with which he had left her and her little daughter on the last day of
his life--come silently into the hall. She had seen him, moving softly,
attracting no notice from them, pass the groups of ladies standing near
the walls, and noiselessly thread his way through the ring of playing
children, till he stood at the back of his own little girl. She had
seen him, smiling still, and clasping his hands tenderly beneath the
child's chin, pull her softly backwards, and lay her dead upon the
floor.

FREDDY'S SHIP

"A day or two, and I must return these people's call," Mrs Macmichel
said to herself as she passed the Rectory gate. "What a bore!"

Two or three days ago the rector and his wife, calling on their new
parishioner at the Court, had found her just returned from lunch with
the shooting party in the field.

"Bad luck, wasn't it?" she asked, later, of the half-dozen men to whom
she was giving tea in the billiard-room. "If I'd stayed to watch you
shoot for another five minutes, I should have escaped them! Not a bad,
dowdy little woman--the man a worse stick in the drawing-room than the
pulpit, if possible. Subjects: his--parish room he wants to build;
hers--son at sea, or going to sea, or has been to sea, or something.
What is it to me? If he is drowned fifty fathoms deep at the bottom of
the sea, do I care?"

"Now, if I only have the good luck to pick on a day when they're out!"
she said as she stepped briskly along; a tall, and handsome, and
fashionable-looking woman, in her hat with the green twisted veil and
the