ollection of presents
to send home to English friends. Sylvia was tempted to buy some on her
own account, and it was a new and depressing experience to feel that she
must not spend an unnecessary penny. Her little hoard was diminishing
rapidly, and she was growing more and more anxious to be safest home,
and free from at least immediate anxiety.

There was no lady courier to accompany her on this journey, for the days
of independence had begun, and she preferred to be alone to wrestle with
her forebodings, and try to bring herself into a fitting frame of mind
for that trying return to the old scenes.

The parting from the Nisbets was like saying good-bye once more to the
dear dad, and she felt hopelessly adrift without their wise and tender
counsels, and the feeling of loneliness grew ever deeper and deeper as
she approached the English shores.

The great shock through which she had passed had loosened all the ties
in life, and made the friends of a few weeks ago seem but the merest of
acquaintances. Bridgie had written the sweetest of sympathetic letters,
but sorry though she might be, the force of circumstances kept the two
girls so far apart, that what had been the saddest time in her friend's
life had seen the climax of her own gaiety. She had been dancing, and
singing, and pleasure making while Sylvia shed the bitter tears of
bereavement, and in a few weeks more she would be spirited off in
Esmeralda's train to another scene of gaiety. The O'Shaughnessys were
by nature so light of heart that they might not care to welcome among
them a black-robed figure of grief!

Sylvia felt as though the whole wide world yawned between her and the
old interests, and did not yet realise that this feeling of aloofness
from the world and its interests is one of the invariable accompaniments
of grief. She was young and not given to serious reflection, and she
knew only that she was tired and miserable, that the white cliffs about
which she had been accustomed to speak with patriotic fervour, looked
bleak and cheerless in the light of a wet and chilly evening.

June though it was, she was glad to wrap herself in her cloak, and pull
her umbrella over her head as she passed down the gangway on to the
stage. In Paris it had been a glorious summer day, and the change to
wet and gloom seemed typical of the home-coming before her. The cloaked
and mackintoshed figures on the stage seemed all black, all the same.
She would not lo