uncheckered by a
single hope. Sir Stafford was indeed recovering, but so slowly that
weeks might be required ere he could proceed on his journey. How were
they to be passed? was the fearful question to which she could find no
answer. She looked with actual envy at the party of boors who played at
dominos in the beer-house opposite, and followed with longing eyes the
little mail-cart as it left the village. If she could read Germau, there
were scores of books at her service. If she could but take a charitable
turn, there was poverty enough to give her occupation from morn till
night. She never knew what it was to think seriously, for meditation is
the manufacture that cannot work without its raw material, and with this
her mind was not stored.

It was in this pitiable frame of mind she was walking up and down the
drawing-room one morning, just as the doctor had taken his departure,
and with him the last little scene that was to relieve the day, when
the servant entered with the card of Colonel Haggerstone, and the daily
repeated inquiry for Sir Stafford's health.

Had the gallant colonel presented himself at Wilton Crescent, or the
Villa, it is more than likely that the well-instructed porter had not
vised his passport, but at once consigned a name of such unimposing
consonants to gentle obscurity, while such an entry in the visiting-book
had been coolly set down as a mistake. Not so now, however. Lady Hester
took up the card, and, instead of the habitual curt rejoinder, "Sir
Stafford is better," said, "You may tell Colonel Haggerstone that Lady
Hester will receive him."

The gallant colonel, who was negligently slapping his boots with his
riding-whip below stairs, was not a little amazed at the message.
There had been a time when he would have interpreted the favor most
flatteringly. He would have whispered to himself, "She has seen me
passing the window, she was struck with me as I rode by." Time had,
however, toned down these bright illusions, and he read the permission
with a nearer approach to truth, as a fine-lady caprice in a moment of
ennui. "I thought as much," muttered he to himself as he slowly ascended
the stairs; "the blockade was too strictly enforced not to tell at last.
No newspapers, no books ha! ha! Could n't help surrendering!"

The colonel had by this time given his whiskers and moustaches the
last curl, thrown back his head into a position of calm dignity, as the
servant, throwing wide the foldi