"Will she? Oh, you'll smooth her down. Stay! Tell her I shall be back to tea."

"We shall be having tea directly."

"I declare I had quite forgotten. Aunt Hilary, you must change your hours. They don't suit me at all. No men can ever stand early dinners. By, by! You are the very prettiest auntie. Be sure you get home safe. Hollo, there! That's my omnibus."

He jumped on the top of it, and was off.

Aunt Hilary stood quite confounded, and with one of those strange sinkings of the heart which had come over her several times this day. It was not that Ascott showed any unkindness—that there was any actual badness in his bright and handsome young face. Still there was a want there—want of earnestness, steadfastness, truthfulness, a something more discoverable as the lack of something else than as aught in itself tangibly and perceptibly wrong. It made her sad; it caused her to look forward to his future with an anxious heart. It was so different from the kind of anxiety, and yet settled repose, with which she thought of the only other man in whose future she felt the smallest interest. Of Robert Lyon, she was certain that whatever misfortune visited him he would bear it in the best way it could be borne; whatever temptation assailed him he would fight against it as a brave and good Christian should fight. But Ascott?

Ascott's life was as yet an unanswered query. She could but leave it in Omnipotent hands.

So she found her way home, asking it once or twice of civil policemen, and going a little distance round—dare I make this romantic confession about so sensible and practical a little woman?—that she might walk once up Burton Street and down again. But nobody knew the fact, and it did nobody any harm.

Meantime at No 15 the afternoon had passed heavily enough. Miss Selina had gone to lie down; she always did of Sundays, and Elizabeth, after making her comfortable, by the little attentions the lady always required, had descended to the dreary wash house, which had been appropriated to herself, under the name of a "private kitchen," in the which, after all the cleanings and improvements she could achieve, sat like Marius among the rains of Carthage, and sighed for the tidy bright house place at Stowbury. Already, from her brief experience, she had decided that London people were horrid shams, because they did not in the least care to have their kitchens comfortable. She wondered how she should ever exist in this one, and might have carried her sad and sullen face up stairs, if Miss Leaf had not come down stairs, and glancing about with that ever gentle smile of hers, said kindly, "Well, it is not very pleasant, but you have made the best of it, Elizabeth. We must all put up with something, you know. Now, as my eyes are not very good to-day, suppose you come up and read me a chapter."

So, in the quiet parlor, the maid sat down opposite her mistress, and read aloud out of that Book which says distinctly: "Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as unto Christ: knowing, that whatsoever good thing a man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free."

And yet says immediately after: "Ye masters, to the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him."