from the sofa as she did so. But for the doubt and weight at his heart, he could have smiled to see the slight, shrinking form slide from its recumbent attitude, and stand before him like a chidden child.

'Nay, Eve, no need for penitence so deep. My mother will marvel how I can so soon have changed as to have inspired my wife with awe so deep. Think of me not as an angry schoolmaster, but as—as very unworthy, perhaps, but still your husband.'

He put his hand on the head bent towards him, and tried to raise the face which eluded his eye. But with a little laugh she slipped away; and glad that she did laugh, nor guessing how forced it was, he also smiled and left her. Left her to recal to herself that here, in this honoured mother, was another claim upon her for affection and care, which she could scarcely fail to neglect, with a mind so preoccupied and wretched. With true waywardness, she was tempted to repine that Mrs. Philipson was not a haughty, disagreeable woman, to be kept at arm's length and defied. She dreaded the mild, motherly glance which asked so tenderly for confidence. In wronging him, she had wronged her at the tenderest

point. And as all these serpentlike cares devoured her, came the summons to dinner; and so Eve took her place for the first time in the family circle.

Mrs. Philipson's home-circle formed a strange alembic wherein to test the true metal of a

character. It was free from follies; the world came but little there to disturb her rest; she did not even cultivate the higher follies of literature and science, as many recluses do. Not that, in themselves, literature and science deserve such an epithet; but they have a spurious offspring, which fritter away powers and time as effectually as visiting and dress. If you would not be silent all day long in her house, or talk for ever of politics, or the graver topics of the hour, your conversation must insensibly quit the beaten track, and wander off to higher ground, to the realms of thought and feeling, or the still more holy precincts of the temple. A hypocritical woman of the world, with that valuable possession, plenty of tact, could better have trodden those paths than poor little Eve; whose deceptions had been great, but not habitual; were less the result of natural evil than bad training. Accordingly, her defective education (defective

as far as moral culture went), her ill-regulated mind, were frequently betrayed when her opinions were asked, or her judgment appealed to. She was no longer the petted child, to be tapped upon the cheek and laughed at, when a silly or unguarded expression escaped her—but a woman, a wife, whose very words were to carry an influence for good or evil to those around her. Sir Mark's good sense began to awaken to the mistake he had made; these were no exciting scenes, where accomplishments or mere beauty could dazzle and delude him. Here, in his mother's quiet home, with her words in his ear, telling so unconsciously of a mind and spirit weaned already from the follies of time, and mellowing in the radiance of the eternity to which she was drawing near, Eve's light comments or perverted sentiments jarred upon him for the first time; and the clinging tenderness, which might have blinded his affection or his vanity to her faults, she had not to give, and dreaded now to feign. But if he was not lenient by nature, he was patient, as he had told her long before. In spite of her coldness, in spite of her faults, she was still his. Disappointed in her, as she now was, his hopes turned eagerly to what

she might be made.

Meanwhile he was grate

ful to his mother for the forbearance with which she restrained all observations on what was but too apparent to her. She dwelt kindly on the good qualities—she was silent as to the evil. If sometimes those blue eyes rose rather quickly to Eve's face, when a chance word surprised or grieved her, no rebuke or comment pointed out to him more strongly his wife's errors. But in secret, how the mother's heart bled for him; how night after night that aged head turned sleeplessly upon its pillow, and the earnest prayer ascended for help and guidance for him, for herself, and for the unhappy girl to whom she had looked so implicitly as the crowning blessing of their bright lot. In spite of Eve's efforts to be gay, resulting too often in hollow levity as unlike herself as it was painful, Mrs. Philipson became day by day more convinced that she was unhappy. She dared not conjecture the cause; she dreaded lest the natural disappointment and indignation of the mother might cloud the charity of the Christian.

'Resentment, fault-finding, will be of no avail-will but embitter us, and render hopeless what is sufficiently unpromising. She is

young, she is ignorant; there are no marvels too great to be wrought by the influences of Divine truth. It may please God yet to make her our pride and joy. Let me cast my care on Him, and wait patiently.'

As her hopes sank lower day by day, she yet trembled as the time for their departure drew near. She thought of the dangers to which one so young and thoughtless might be exposed in the busy world.

'I am very sorry to lose you both,' she said to Sir Mark; when was I ever glad to see you go away ? And now I shall follow Eve in her new career with infinite anxiety; it will be a trying and dizzy one; and she is so young and inexperienced, I wish her lot lay amid quieter scenes. I shall welcome her back again with gladness. She can never

come too soon.'

Sir Mark's first impulse was of grateful and somewhat surprised feeling; his next of hesitation and pain. So often as he had accused his mother of a trust in every one far too implicit so often as he had warned her that she seemed to expect the wisdom of age from girls whose locks were golden with life's morning rays—why did she now look forth anxiously