Mrs. Lowe was lying on the sofa, comfortably packed up and half asleep.

"My dear!" said her husband in a high key. "Yes, Colonel!" she answered with a start.

"I do believe you were asleep again, Matilda," he said tartly.

"Asleep! What nonsense! when you know I never sleep," was her reply, made peevishly.

It was an old battle-ground between them, and the weapons were never suffered to grow rusty by disuse.

"I think we will have a dinner-party, Matilda," said the Colonel, stirring the fire.

"A dinner-party!" she echoed.

"Did I not speak plainly, my dear? I said a dinner-party, and I meant a dinner-party," returned the Colonel; the accompaniment of falling coals lending a curiously warlike clang to his words.

"Yes, Colonel; certainly. Who are they to be?" said Mrs. Lowe, with that air of frightened submission which always irritated her husband. It is only fair to her to say that an air of anything else would have irritated him just as much.

"Let me see. Suppose we say the Rector and Mrs. Borrodaile, Fletcher and his sister, the Collinsons, Dr. Wickham, and the Hamleys. There's

a new girl there-Mrs. Hamley's niece; Reginald's daughter I imagine she must be the Captain We'll have her out, and see what

never married.

she is like."

Mrs. Lowe repeated the names. "That makes eleven," she said.

"Yes; fourteen with ourselves. Seven of a sort," said Colonel Lowe. "Nobody likely to take anybody else by the throat, and two pretty girls as the enliveners among you old women. So perhaps you will write the notes at once, my dear; and John can take them round. This day fortnight January the third-unless you are too sleepy."

"How fond you are of saying disagreeable things!" said poor Mrs. Lowe in her ill-used tone, as she slowly unpacked herself from her comfortable nest of shawls and pillows, and went shivering and tumbled to her davenport.

But she dared not remonstrate.

Colonel Lowe

was not the man to sleep on a project; and when he began to stir the whole house must be up and doing. It was always taking time by the forelock with him and striking while the iron was hot; and his thoughts and plans were full-grown Minervas, matured at their birth and never needing nursing. So the notes were written and the servant sent out with

VOL. I.

them on the instant; for all that it was a damp, dark, unpleasant night in December, and to-morrow morning would have done just as well. But to men like Colonel Lowe servants are only animated machines who have to do as they are commanded, and are not allowed the effeminacy of taking cold in bad weather or of feeling fatigue after hard work. If he had brought nothing else with him out of the army he had brought the habit of command; and there was not a living creature about Cragfoot who did not recognise the master's hand when he raised it-save Sydney; and even with him there were conditions and barriers he could not pass; if few, yet immovable. And one of these was-he must marry money or he must accept disinheritance.

CHAPTER XI.

DILEMMAS.

THE invitation to Cragfoot came to Abbey Holme

just as Dora and Mr. Hamley were settling to their evening bézique. Mrs. Hamley was not playing to-night. She was deep in a quarterly article on the latest book of scandalous chronicles, where all the highly spiced bits were extracted, fenced about by an editorial padding of reprehension; by which means was accomplished that feat, so dear to English respectability, of enjoying impropriety under the pretext of condemnation.

"An invitation to Cragfoot!" said Mrs. Hamley, with a perceptible sneer. "How strangely even people who should be well-bred forget themselves! As if Patricia or myself could possibly go out in our first mourning! For you are specially asked too, Patricia, though they have not called on you yet. Odd manners for Lady Graham's daughter, to say the least of it!"

"I do not want people to call on me, and I do not want to go out to dinner," said Patricia hastily.

Don't be silly," returned Mrs. Hamley sharply. "And don't be affected. Of course you will have to go out like any other person when your first mourning is over. I hate these pretences of being unlike other people; and you are far too fond, Patricia, of posing yourself as something special and peculiar, and, I suppose, something better than any one else."

"I did not mean it as a pretence or affectation," said Patricia.

"Yes, you did; and do not contradict," snapped her aunt. "And I would make you go now, only it would be absurd in your deep crape. And she ought to have remembered this, silly little woman! That eternal catarrh of hers seems to have really softened her brain.".

Fortunately for Dora the name of Sydney Lowe's mother was not mentioned.

"What is all the row about, Lady?" asked Mr. Hamley in his rolling, unctuous voice, with his terminal h's and odd mixture of pomposity and vulgarity.

She looked at him with cold annoyance; when she was displeased, no one was right, and Mr.