of an undertaker's mute. And so he had
shrunk back into himself, wearing his stiffest air as a shield and
leaving it to Mary to parry colonial inquisitiveness.

When he reckoned that he had allowed time enough for the disposal of
the last pots and pans, he rose and made his way--well, the word "home"
was by now become a mere figure of speech. He entered a scene of the
wildest confusion. The actual sale was over, but the work of stripping
the house only begun, and successful bidders were dragging off their
spoils. His glass-fronted bookcase had been got as far as the
surgery-door. There it had stuck fast; and an angry altercation was
going on, how best to set it free. A woman passed him bearing Mary's
girandoles; another had the dining-room clock under her arm; a third
trailed a whatnot after her. To the palings of the fence several carts
and buggies had been hitched, and the horses were eating down his
neatly clipped hedge--it was all he could do not to rush out and call
their owners to account. The level sunrays flooded the rooms, showing
up hitherto unnoticed smudges and scratches on the wall-papers; showing
the prints of hundreds of dusty feet on the carpetless floors. Voices
echoed in hollow fashion through the naked rooms; men shouted and spat
as they tugged heavy articles along the hall, or bumped them down the
stairs. It was pandemonium. The death of a loved human being could not,
he thought, have been more painful to witness. Thus a home went to
pieces; thus was a page of one's life turned.--He hastened away to
rejoin Mary.

There followed a week of Mrs. Tilly's somewhat stifling hospitality,
when one was forced three times a day to over-eat oneself for fear of
giving offence; followed formal presentations of silver and plate from
Masonic Lodge and District Hospital, as well as a couple of public
testimonials got up by his medical brethren. But at length all was
over: the last visit had been paid and received, the last evening party
in their honour sat through; and Mahony breathed again. He had felt
stiff and unnatural under this overdose of demonstrativeness. Now--as
always on sighting relief from a state of things that irked him--he
underwent a sudden change, turned hearty and spontaneous, thus
innocently succeeding in leaving a good impression behind him. He kept
his temper, too, in all the fuss and ado of departure: the running to
and fro after missing articles, the sitting on the lids of overflowing
trun