you possess the one or the other. And now, my dear Una, attention, if you please. I am just at the delicate curves of your exceedingly dainty and difficult little mouth, and it is essential that we have peace and quiet. My Genius is a very Egeria, and needs the sweet influence of repose if she is to guide my hand to good work. So please remain as you are. You are perfect, my little friend-absolutely perfect!"

CHAPTER IV.

TAKING BREATH.

THE next few weeks passed quietly. Local history stood still, and nothing was afloat save the illness of Mrs. Latrobe's child, and the speculations of the neighbours as to whether Dr. Quigley would pull the little fellow through or no. Winter was slowly passing into springvery slowly indeed-like the tardy waking of a sluggard who will not raise himself to active life; and the moment was emphatically one of suspended animation and taking breath all round.

To Stella it was as if she had come into a strange phase of existence where she had to learn a new language and forget her old songs. She and Randolph Mackenzie had now nothing to say to each other, and spent their time, when they were together, in staring blankly at the

dead past. The fertile theme of converse was closed against them, and they stood in dumb distress before the shut gates of their forbidden pleasance. Cyril, who had been their one inexhaustible subject of living talk, lay now as a dumb, dead thing between them. They thought of nothing else, but they never spoke of him; and they had nothing else to speak of. Therefore, the presence of that good, honesthearted if stupid-headed Pylades, which had always brought with it the reflected lustre of memory and association, became now as dark as the rest; and poor Stella had no more of that moonlight-coloured happiness, which until now it had been his appointed mission to bestow.

Also, without doubt, she had lost her old place with her father-and Hortensia Lyon had taken it; and as yet she scarcely understood the boundaries of her new sphere, or could say when or where Hortensia had dispossessed her. An odd kind of coolness had sprung up between daughter and father, which both felt and which neither would have confessed nor could perhaps have assigned to its exact cause. Certainly, she had broken down under the strain of her close attendance on him after her mother's death, so that he had been forced to have a secretary to do the work for which, since nature

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had so manifestly consecrated her, he thought that love should have made her strong enough. And she knew that he was disappointed and annoyed with her because of her failure-a failure which Hortensia always accentuated so bitterly and against which she placed in contrast herself and her devotion, as a shining statue of silver against a dull background of lead.

Yet Stella could not beg her father to let her take up her dropped burden. She could not!no, not even if that should include his renewed approbation! She felt that it was better for both, and better even for her love for him, that she knew little of, and was associated not at all with, the life of that stifling studio. The work, in the admiration of which she had been brought up as in a fixed doctrine of righteousness, had become quite another thing to her of late from what it had been in the old days of reverent worship, when her mother had impressed on her, as the eleventh commandment, the majesty of papa's genius, the gloriousness of its results, and the indisputable right of the domestic Apollo to her very life and her first cares. Stella had not yet come to Mrs. Morshead's state of mind when she could call it all "horrid stuff" and "vile balderdash." That would have been

a species of blasphemy still to her. But she was in the state when the paternal poetry and music were inexpressibly wearisome; when she had no kind of interest in the paternal pictures; and when the whole thing was to her dry husks and lifeless chaff. It was all her own fault, that she knew; still, there it was, and she could not conceal it from herself!

Beyond this unconfessed coolness because of her intellectual defection from her duty stood Hortensia, as even a graver cause for sorrow. Creeping into Stella's rightful place in Mr. Branscombe's heart, nearer and nearer as the days went on, the little Puritan was indeed taking that place which was the daughter's and should have remained hers to the end. But how to cut the ground from under those stealthy crafty feet? She, Stella, could not tell her father that he was not to write odes and sonnets to Hortensia Lyon, because she, his daughter, was jealous and did not like it. Neither could she tell Hortensia that she was not to be her father's model, now as Una, now as Miranda, again as Evangeline, and again as only herself idealized, because she, her friend, was jealous of that too, and did not like it. She had to bear it quietly, whether she liked it or no; and her feelings in the matter made no part of the play.