o you.'

Her impatient attendant scolds her, tells her I am not in mourning, bids
her look again, tries to rouse her.

'You have seen my son, sir,' says the elder lady. 'Are you reconciled?'

Looking fixedly at me, she puts her hand to her forehead, and moans.
Suddenly, she cries, in a terrible voice, 'Rosa, come to me. He is
dead!' Rosa kneeling at her feet, by turns caresses her, and quarrels
with her; now fiercely telling her, 'I loved him better than you ever
did!'--now soothing her to sleep on her breast, like a sick child. Thus
I leave them; thus I always find them; thus they wear their time away,
from year to year.

What ship comes sailing home from India, and what English lady is this,
married to a growling old Scotch Croesus with great flaps of ears? Can
this be Julia Mills?

Indeed it is Julia Mills, peevish and fine, with a black man to carry
cards and letters to her on a golden salver, and a copper-coloured woman
in linen, with a bright handkerchief round her head, to serve her Tiffin
in her dressing-room. But Julia keeps no diary in these days; never
sings Affection's Dirge; eternally quarrels with the old Scotch Croesus,
who is a sort of yellow bear with a tanned hide. Julia is steeped in
money to the throat, and talks and thinks of nothing else. I liked her
better in the Desert of Sahara.

Or perhaps this IS the Desert of Sahara! For, though Julia has a stately
house, and mighty company, and sumptuous dinners every day, I see no
green growth near her; nothing that can ever come to fruit or flower.
What Julia calls 'society', I see; among it Mr. Jack Maldon, from his
Patent Place, sneering at the hand that gave it him, and speaking to me
of the Doctor as 'so charmingly antique'. But when society is the name
for such hollow gentlemen and ladies, Julia, and when its breeding is
professed indifference to everything that can advance or can retard
mankind, I think we must have lost ourselves in that same Desert of
Sahara, and had better find the way out.

And lo, the Doctor, always our good friend, labouring at his Dictionary
(somewhere about the letter D), and happy in his home and wife. Also
the Old Soldier, on a considerably reduced footing, and by no means so
influential as in days of yore!

Working at his chambers in the Temple, with a busy aspect, and his hair
(where he is not bald) made more rebellious than ever by the constant
friction of his lawyer's-wig, I come, in a later time, upon my dear