th a pained surprise, and
commented upon to the conscience-stricken Mark.

Day after day he sat in the little morning-room, which looked as if
she had but left it for an instant, even while he knew that she might
never enter it again; sat there listening and waiting for the words
which would tell him that all hope was at an end.

The doctors came and went, and there were anxious inquiries and
whispered answers at the cautiously-opened front-door, while from time
to time he heard on the stairs, or in the room above, hurried
footsteps, each of which trod heavy upon his aching heart.

People came sometimes to sit with him. Trixie, for instance, who had
married her artist, and was now comfortably established in a
decorative little cottage at Bedford Park, came daily, and as she had
the tact to abstain from any obviously unfounded assumption of
hopefulness, her presence did him good, and perhaps saved him from
breaking down under the prolonged strain.

Martha, too, even though she had never been able to feel warmly
towards her sister-in-law, cast aside some of her prejudice and held
aloof no longer.

Martha was inclined to take a serious view of things, having caught
something of her mother's gloomy Puritanism, which her own unhappy
disposition and contracted life had done nothing to sweeten, and not a
little to embitter. She was not, perhaps, incapable of improving the
occasion for her brother's benefit even then, by warnings against
devotion to perishable idols, and hints of chastenings which were
intended as salutary.

But somehow, when she saw his lined and colourless face, and the look
of ghastly expectation that came and went upon it at the slightest
unexpected sound without, she lost hold of the conviction that his
bereavement would work for his spiritual benefit; her words in season
died unspoken on her lips, and she gave way at parting to tears of
pity and sympathy, in which the saint was completely forgotten in the
sister and the woman.

And now it was evening, and he was alone once more, pretending to
read, and thinking drearily of what was coming; for the doctor had
just left, and his report had been less encouraging than ever--a
change must come before long, he had said, and from his manner it was
too clear what he thought that change would be.

Mark let his thoughts wander back to his brief married life, doomed to
be cut short by the very fraud which had purchased it. They had been
so happy, and it w