Some girls would not have scrupled to hint that they would have been independent but for circumstances over which the mother had had control, but had not exercised it. But Henny only sighed, and listened in patience.

In the end, she had been grudgingly permitted to engage herself to the man of her choice. But she could not talk of him to her mother as a daughter wishes to talk on such a subject. In one particular Mrs. Helford had certainly found nothing to complain of. 'I only hope, Henny,' she had somewhat ungraciously observed, 'that this new attraction. will not cause you to neglect poor Stevie.' So far from doing so, it had, if possible, drawn the bonds of her affection for the child still closer. She was resolved that he at least should never lack a loving confidante; and all his little secrets were her own.

On the road of love and duty, indeed, Henny Helford was a constant traveller; and,

no matter how rough it may be, it is rarely an unpleasant one. Nor was it in her case, truth to say, so rough as it looked. Her mother's affection for her was deep and firm enough under the mud, and even more genuine, perhaps, than her more demonstrative regard for her dead boy. In the latter case, it was not that she did protest too much,' but that she found protestation necessary to still certain misgivings and even self-reproaches in respect to him; and I think her daughter guessed something of this, and forgave her the more readily. At all events, notwithstanding that she passed her life in what may have seemed to young ladies of spirit a dull round, Henny Helford was a happy girl, and there was a young lady of spirit next door who would have given her ears, and her earrings too, to change places with her.

'You will not be gone long at all events, I do hope,' said Mrs. Helford, perceiving that Henny had not laid down her bonnet and

shawl on the first summons to surrender. 'You must not forget Stevie's lessons.'

As Henny taught and heard them every day with the same regularity with which she said her prayers, it was not very likely that she would forget them. But the fact was, Mrs. Helford was one of those women who share with some domestic animals the same repugnance to be left alone. Pet dogs will trot to the door directly they find themselves in solitude, and sniff and sob under it till some friendly human being comes to relieve their ennui; and cats will leave the hearthrug and take up their quarters, for the same reason, on the very threshold, at the risk of being knocked over by the next incomer. The widow, of course, didn't do that; but, having no resources of her own except fancy needlework, she craved for company. versation she did not desire; she could supply talk in any quantity; but she wanted a listener, to whom she could pour out her woes—

Con

past, present, and to come-like tears out of a tea-pot. I have sometimes thought if such people could have a telephone fitted up for them in which they could discourse their full, with replies from the other end provided at long intervals by contract, human life would go on more smoothly for many of us.

It may be inquired, since this lady was really devoted to her grandchild, why the little boy was not sent for to relieve guard in her daughter's absence. But the fact was that Stevie's remarks when she was alone with him rather disconcerted Mrs. Helford. Though legitimate enough, he was a child of nature, and embarrassed his grandmother by his plain speaking. He was thin and small as a shrimp, with a head ever so much too large for him, so that he looked like a note of admiration; but his character was by no means in consonance with his appearance in that respect. He was always rubbing the gilt off some gingerbread theory which other

children swallow without inquiry. He had endeared himself, I am afraid, to the Canon by his scepticism, quite as much as by any charm of childhood. The divine had quoted to him the Miltonic account of the eating of the Forbidden Fruit as a lesson against greediness.

Such delight till then, as seemed in fruit she never tasted.

Greedily she engorged without restraint.

This view of our first parent at meals delighted Stevie, but he was incredulous as to the cause of the catastrophe that 'brought death into the world and all our woe.'

He thought the motive too inadequate. 'It couldn't have been an apple,' he said. 'It must have been a peach.'

Adam's confession, too, was not received by Stevie with the approval with which the poet would appear to regard it.

This woman whom thou madest to be my help,