r of
the whole world, yet their own peculiar property. For is she not a
Hydriot shareholder, and does she not like to know that it was to
Harold's revival of those shares that she chiefly owes her present
means? Since her mother's death she has lived among them at the house
that was old Miss Woolmer's, and is tranquilly happy in finding
happiness for other people, and always being ready when any one needs
her, as our dear old uncle does very often, though I think her Hydriot
boys have the most of her.

Hippolyta made Eustace a good wife, and watched over him well; but
there was no preventing his deficiency from increasing; it became
acknowledged disease of the brain, and he did not survive his cousin
six years. Happily none of his feebleness of intellect seems to have
descended to Eustace the third, who is growing up a steady, sensible
lad under his mother's management; and perhaps it is not the worse for
Arghouse to have become a Horsman dependency.

It was the year before Eustace's death that the conductress of the
school at Baden wrote to Mrs. Alison about Dora. The sad state of her
brother had prevented her coming home or being visited, and though I
exchanged letters with her periodically, we had not sufficient
knowledge of one another for any freedom of expression after she had
conquered the difficulties of writing.

When she was a little more than sixteen, came a letter to tell that she
was wasting away in either atrophy or consumption, and that the doctors
said the only hope for her was home and native air. Poor child! what
home was there for her, with her sister-in-law absorbed in the care of
her brother, whose imbecility was no spectacle for one in a critical
state of health and failing spirits? We were at Arked at the time, and
offered to go and fetch her (it was Dermot's kind thought), leaving the
children to Viola's care.

Poor dear, what a sight she was! Tall in proportion to the giant breed
she came of, but thin to the most painful degree, and bending like a
fishing-rod, or a plant brought up in the dark, which, by-the-by, she
most resembled, with her white face and thin yellow hair. Her
complexion had recovered, but her hair never had, nor, as it proved,
her health, for she had been more or less ailing ever since she came,
and the regimen of the frugal Germans had not supported the
fast-growing English girl's frame, any more than the strict and
thorough-going round of accurate education had su