'Should you ever have done it?'

'Well,' said the Doctor, not choosing to answer the question, 'you may tell him to come for Easter. I suppose that is his only time. He would have been wiser to wait a bit longer—may be till this foreign trip is over—that is if the child goes, and I don't believe she will.'

The Mays themselves had had a winter of sorrow. That living death—for it had long hardly been life—of poor little Margaret Rivers had come to an end in February. It was scarcely to be mourned. The poor girl had, since her conscience had awakened, grieved so bitterly over every outbreak of her own unhappy temper, and had suffered so sadly from depression of spirits, that the peace of her final decay had been an untold blessing. Even her mother, when she thought of the dreary lot of a sickly, suffering, almost deformed heiress, could not but resign herself to feel that 'it was well with the child.' Her father, however, who had been spared much realisation of the distress of body and mind, was restlessly unhappy at the loss, and fancied he should cure his wife's sore heart by taking her to Switzerland and the Tyrol; and Flora, in the desire to make the journey a pleasure to somebody, and noticing Gertrude's pale cheeks, proposed to take her. That whole last year, ever since her Christmas at Vale Leston, Gertrude's whole treatment of her poor little niece had been reversed; and she had changed from the somewhat hard deportment to which young aunts are prone, to a kindness which, being a late and unexpected boon, had been valued by poor capricious Margaret beyond all the steady tenderness of her grandfather and elder aunt. It had endeared Gertrude greatly to Flora, and the benefit to the girl's spirits influenced her quite as much as the advantage it would be to George to have some one to conduct to the sights, which for his own part he did not care for.

Daisy herself gave no consent. 'To be lionised by George! Rather worse than an excursion of Cook's,' she said; 'and fancy the evenings!'

'It would be a kindness to George and Flora,' said Ethel.

'You horrid creature! That's to set my conscience worrying.'

'At least, there would be the coming home again.'

'That's the way you look on travelling!' said Gertrude, laughing a little, but returning to her weary attitude, and Ethel abstained from persuasion. She had not sufficient experience of change of scene to believe greatly in its advantages, and though she was in favour of the project, it was rather with a view to the fresh start it would make for her sister at home than with the belief that either pictures or mountains could be enjoyed under George Rivers's lumbering escort. She expected that poor Lancelot Underwood's attempt would precipitate the decision, when, in answer to her brief note of invitation, he replied that he would arrive on Easter Eve.

'That's all right,' quoth the Doctor. 'He knows better than to come a-courting on Good Friday.'

The day was not, however, exempt from a visitor; Dr. and Mrs. Cheviot were away for the holidays, and the Mays were the more surprised to see Mr. Rupert Cheviot, with his dapper little umbrella, issue from the professor's door to join them on their way to church. Except that they would have preferred not to talk at all on such a day, there was no fault to find with him; he was subdued and proper behaved, and had a good deal to say about Ammergau. He had not been so much at Stoneborough within the last few months, and Ethel suspected that he had been warned by Tom to give his sister time to recover from her winter's grief. To her, he was amusing, he was a candid, lively, pleasant person, and rated her more highly than she was used to from her sister's lovers, and seldom came in her way without holding a lively tournament in the language of jest, but with a good deal of earnest in it, and she saw enough stuff in him to make his self-complacency not so obnoxious to her as it was to her juniors. She was not sorry that Gertrude's aversion to him was so strong, but she thought it rather instinctive than reasonable. He was a man whose opinions and disposition would right themselves in process of time, but the having Daisy bound to him during the process was quite another thing.