and share the joys and sorrows of
our employers. This boy doesn't, to judge by the way he sings that he
is "Only the Ghost of a Mother-in-law," showing that he goes to the
music-halls.

* * * * *

Less than ten minutes after the telegraph-boy has died away in the
distance Rosalind and her husband are telling a cab to take them to
174, Ball Street, Mayfair.

It does so grudgingly, because of the state of the roads. It wants
three-and-sixpence, and gets it, for the same reason. But it doesn't
appear to be drawn by a logical horse who can deal with inferences,
because it is anxious to know when its clients are going back, that
it may call round for them.

For the telegram was that there was "no cause immediate apprehension;
perhaps better come--Major." As might have been expected from such
a telegram about a man of his age, just after seeming recovery from an
attack of bronchitis, the hours on earth of its subject were numbered.
Fever may abate, temperature may be brought down to the normal, the
most nourishing possible nourishment may be given at the shortest
possible intervals, but the recoil of exhaustion will have its way when
there is little or nothing left to exhaust. Colonel Lund had possibly
two or three years of natural life before him, disease apart, when
a fierce return of the old enemy, backed by the severity of a London
winter, and even more effectually by its fog, stopped the old heart a
few thousand beats too soon, and ended a record its subject had ceased
to take an interest in a few paragraphs short of the normal _finis_.

We allow our words to overtake our story in this way because we know
that you know--you who read--exactly what follows telegrams like the
one that came to Mrs. Fenwick. If you are new and young, and do not
know it yet, you will soon. However, we can now go back.

When the economical landlady (a rather superior person) who had opened
the street-door was preceding Rosalind up the narrow stairs, and
turning up gas-jets from their reserve of darkness-point, she surprised
her by saying she thought there was the Major coming downstairs.
"Yes, madam; the Major--Major Roper," she continued, in reply to an
expression of astonishment. Rosalind had forgotten that Colonel Lund
was, outside her own family, "the Colonel."

It was Major Roper whom we have seen at the Hurkaru Club, as purple as
ever and more asthmatic--in fact, the noise that was the Major coming