needed indulgences that it would have pained me very much to see them go
without. How is Irene?"

"I don't know," said Mrs. Lawrence fretfully. "She does mope so. I shall
be so glad to get away."

"I have just come from the doctor's. We are to start on Thursday.
Sylvie, are you all ready?"

"Yes," with a positive little nod.

He stepped into the next room. Irene had been worse after Mrs. Minor's
visit, but was the same again now, quiet, cold, impassible. It made no
difference to her whether they remained here, or went to Depford Beach.
She evinced neither pain, pleasure, nor interest; but she liked best to
be alone. She endured Sylvie with rather more equanimity than she did
her mother, but even the fault-finding energy would have been welcome to
the doctor. Nothing mattered: that was the trouble.

She heard now they were to go in two days. The cottage was all ready.
Martha and Miss Barry's trusty handmaiden were to do the housekeeping.
The place was so arranged, with the spacious hall through the middle,
that each family could be by itself.

"I have ordered a carriage to come every day for you and mother," Fred
said quietly. "I thought you would like it better than being dependent
on Miss Barry."

Irene gave a slow, acquiescent nod.

"Good-by," cried Sylvie, looking in. "I will run over again to-morrow."

"I wanted her to stay to tea," said Mrs. Lawrence complainingly. "It is
so dull!"

"I will come up and take tea with you. I will order it at once." And he
ran down.

There was a subtle perfume in the hall. She had a bunch of violets in
her belt, he remembered. He said over softly Ben Jonson's quaint
lines,--

"Here she was wont to go, and here, and here,
Just where the daisies, pinks, and violets grow:
The world may find the spring by following her."

But he could not follow. Had fate smiled on him to make the
renunciation more bitter? For now he could work his way up to something
worthy of her acceptance. And had he not learned the past winter, had he
not been slowly learning ever since the death and loss, that the manhood
of a gentleman was his thoughtfulness for others, his courteous
delicacy, his consideration, often his denial of self, rather than the
exquisite polish of cultivation, and the veneer of society's
affectations? How blind he must have been, ever to have offered these
last to a woman so true and pure of soul!

But a still larger sacrifice had been dem