arjorie
Westford breathed her last. It was almost empty, and the spot indicated
in the letter was soon determined upon. Aubrey knelt down on the floor,
and commenced, in a most unsystematic way, his task of raising the
board; while Katie, trembling with excitement, dropped grease spots on
his head from her tilted candlestick.

Aubrey's small tools were wholly inadequate to their task, and many were
the cuts and bruises his inexperienced hands received before he at
length succeeded in prising the stubborn plank.

There lay the mahogany box, which, with some trouble, owing to its
weight, they succeeded in bringing to the surface. It fastened by a
simple catch, and was filled with golden guineas.

When Kate bade Aubrey good-night upon the stairs, he detained her a
minute to murmur with a soft light in his dusky eyes,--

"I'm so very, very glad your sacrifice isn't to be made, darling, but
the will is just the same as the deed. I shall love you for it as long
as you live; and better still," he added, with deepening colour and
lowered voice, "God knows, and will love you too."

"THE COLONEL."

BY MARION DICKEN.

Dick was only thirteen years of age, but he was in love, and in love too
with Captain Treves's wife, who, in his eyes, was spick-span perfection.
In their turn Mrs. Treves's two little boys, aged six and five
respectively, were in love with Dick, who appeared to them to be the
model of all that a schoolboy ought to be.

It was in church on Easter Sunday that Dick first realised his passion,
and then--as he glanced from Mrs. Treves to the captain's stalwart
form--the hopelessness of it! He remarked, afterwards, to his brother
Ted, a lieutenant in Treves's regiment, that Mrs. Treves looked
"ripping" in grey. But Ted was busy with his own thoughts, in which, if
the truth be told, the sermon figured as little as in those of his
younger brother.

Dick was on very friendly terms with the Treves and was rather surprised
to find that the captain and his wife treated him more like a little boy
than a "chap of thirteen--in fact, almost fourteen," as he put it to
himself. He used to take Jack and Roy out on the river and to the baths,
where he taught them both to swim. To use Ted's own expression to a
brother-sub, "Dick was making a thorough nursemaid and tutor of himself
to those kids of the captain's." He _was_ teaching them certainly,
unconsciously, but steadily, a great many things.

Jack no longer crie