obituary line--

"We could have better spared a better man."

When his family, and even his wife, reasoned with him, knowing that to
enter Parliament had long been his thought, nay, his desire, and
perhaps herself taking a natural pride in the idea of seeing M.P.--M.P.
of a new and unbribed House of Commons--after his well-beloved name; to
us and to her he gave no clearer motive for his refusal than to the
electors of Norton Bury.

"But you are not old, John," I argued with him one day; "you possess to
the full the mens sana in corpore sano. No man can be more fitted than
yourself to serve his country, as you used to say it might be served,
and you yourself might serve it, after Reform was gained."

He smiled, and jocularly thanked me for my good opinion.

"Nay, such service is almost your duty; you yourself once thought so
too. Why have you changed your mind?"

"I have not changed my mind, but circumstances have changed my actions.
As for duty--duty begins at home. Believe me, I have thought well over
the subject. Brother, we will not refer to it again."

I saw that something in the matter pained him, and obeyed his wish.
Even when, a few days after, perhaps as some compensation for the
mother's disappointment, he gave this hint of Guy's taking his place
and entering Parliament in his room.

For any one--nay, his own son--to take John's place, to stand in John's
room, was not a pleasant thought, even in jest; we let it pass by
unanswered, and John himself did not recur to it.

Thus time went on, placidly enough; the father and mother changed into
grandfather and grandmother, and little Maud into Auntie Maud. She bore
her new honours and fulfilled her new duties with great delight and
success. She had altered much of late years: at twenty was as old as
many a woman of thirty--in all the advantages of age. She was sensible,
active, resolute, and wise; sometimes thoughtful, or troubled with fits
of what in any less wholesome temperament would have been melancholy;
but as it was, her humours only betrayed themselves in some slight
restlessness or irritability, easily soothed by a few tender words or a
rush out to Edwin's, and a peaceful coming back to that happy home,
whose principal happiness she knew that she, the only daughter, made.

She more than once had unexceptionable chances of quitting it; for Miss
Halifax possessed plenty of attractions, both outwardly and inwardly,
to say nothing of her no