"Gi' me my blanket, gaffer. shivers deadly."

I've got the Howarth gave the man his blanket, and marched into the next house. A dozen slatternly women stood with their hands under their tattered aprons, or tying up wisps of disordered hair, whilst they looked on at such part of this scene as was enacted in the open air; but no one of them said anything, or seemed to think anything, and Howarth himself, having with his own hands secured his own rights, went from house to house, and chamber to chamber, looking even bigger and more magisterial than common.

It reached his ears casually, a day or two later, that there were two or three cases of typhoid in Bell's Holly, and one or two in the workhouse infirmary, and he was aware, without associating the facts together, that he himself was feeling very shaky and queer. He thought he would go home and have a cup of tea and go to bed. His wife was a little alarmed for him, but not much. She herself was suffering from the same symptoms, though apparently in a slighter degree, and was satisfied to attribute them to the unusual heat of the weather. But next day neither of them was able to rise, and the doctor being called in had looked grave and shook his head. Typhoid fever. Both cases very bad.

He took the news to Mary, who received it as if it had been a punishment for her own hardness to her parents. She hardly knew of what to accuse herself, and yet an inward voice of accusation seemed to speak. She might have been more yielding, more submissive, less bitter in her thoughts. And now her father and mother were dangerously ill, and might be dying, and though, had they lived in health, their feud could hardly have known any healing, nature spoke out and would have way. How desolate and lonely life would seem if this unfatherly father and unmotherly mother died and left her alone in the world! Their very living, even though they were alienated from her and she from them, had been a something after all.

She broke up the school and hastened home.

"Ah!" said her mother, recognising her, feebly and fretfully, "you've come at last!" Mary kissed her for sole answer, and at once assumed the charge of the two sickrooms. While the pair were conscious they were harsh with her, but when delirium came the memory of late days seemed blotted out of it, and their daughter's voice and hand

could soothe them when every other sound and touch seemed to wound bruised brain and suffering body. They were blinded mercifully from their own anger, and remembered her only by a kindly instinct.

The fever ran much the same course with Howarth and his wife, and so since it had touched him earlier he came out of the delirium and found himself upon the fatal plain of calm the sooner. The room was dim and cool, and Mary was moving noiselessly about the place. A hollow voice--the mere spectre of a voice-addressed her.

"That thee, Polly ?"

She hastened to the bedside, and smoothed the clothes and pillows with a hand that trembled. It neared his cheek and he nestled upon it, rolling his head over to one side and holding the cool hand prisoner there like a child. She let it stay. It was the first caress he had offered her for many and many a day which had not seemed purely mechanical. A tear started at either eye and dropped heavily upon his face. He looked up at her with eyes like a bird's-so large and bright. "Art a good wench," he said.

He nestled down upon the hand again, and seemed to fall asleep. She watched him long, while in the unnatural attitude in which she stood cramps began to rack and twist her, but she would not move whilst there seemed any danger of disturbing him. At length, little by little, she withdrew and left him in an unchanged attitude. Then creeping to her own room she let her heart have vent in natural tears. Love was back again. There was something left to live for, but it seemed for a time as if the pain of it were greater than the joy.

And John Howarth slept with his fathers, and for an hour or two no one discovered that he was gone.

Then little more than a day later his wife followed him without knowing of it, and the girl was alone again.

Everything they had owned came to their daughter, and for awhile Mary left the place, and then coming back resumed her school, though she no longer had need of it, except for heart's food. She must have somebody to care for, so she cared for her children, and but for their society led a life very solitary and quiet.

She bought Mr. Lowther's share of Bell's Holly and pulled the old place down, and took advice about draining the land and building decent cottages there. Winter was coming by this time, and the weather was unseasonable for the sort of operations which

were contemplated, but she walked one evening with a contractor who had in early days been in partnership with her father to look at the place, and to hear his proposals. His business carried him farther than Bell's Holly, and when he had his talk out he bade her good-bye and left her.

She stood awhile in the midst of the ruins, which as yet were but half removed, and then set out to walk through the wintry twilight home. The gas-lit town glimmered before her, and the keen frosty air made motion a pleasure. She was in a state of unusual hopefulness and brightness. Duty done and being done, and all the little cares and tender solicitudes of daily life, were drawing her back to the interest in life which is natural to youth. She thought of these things, and surrendered herself to the new influences half gladly and half regretfully.

She reached her own door and rang there. The rosy maid was taken into service again, and opened the door to her. Mary was passing up-stairs with a cheerful "Thank you" when the maid touched her tremblingly.

FOR an instant this amazing intelligence seemed to paralyze mind and body, and if Mary had not already had a hand upon the stair-rail she would have fallen at the shock. She turned ghostly white, and her heart, after what felt like a pause, began to beat furiously. She could not have told if she were glad, or sorry, or resentful.

broadcast with his feet wide apart, and his arms hanging loosely over the arms of the chair. His head had lurched forward, and his chin was tucked into his disordered waistcoat. Even in that poor light there was no mistaking him.

Yet when she had looked awhile she was impelled to turn the gas a little higher. In the clearer light the returned prodigal lay at a marked disadvantage. The feet seemed to be cast forward in ostentation of the gaping boots and the frayed edges of the trousers. All his raiment was wrinkled, and seedy, and disreputable. His shirt cuffs were crumpled and dirty, his cheek bore a week's black stubble, his nose had taken a tinge of red.

His wife absorbed all these details of his aspect, and stood wondering that she should care so little and feel so undisturbed. She did not know as yet that the shock of his return had dulled all power of feeling, and she stood and noted every shabby sign of social failure and moral degradation as if they were painted in a picture and had no personal interest for her.

There was an odour of bad brandy and stale tobacco about this graceless returned prodigal, and his dissipated, out-at-elbows look was in accord with it. His wife sat down in a chair opposite to him, regarding him fixedly, going over and over again, one by one, the signs of squalor and decay, and little by little the thought grew up in her mind that she was bound to this man for his life or hers. The first apprehension of this fact arose clearly enough. It was not that the knowledge of it seemed incomplete; but at first she lacked the power to care about

Mary moved softly to the door, trembling from head to foot. Three steps carried her across the narrow little hall, and then she paused with a hand upon the doorpost of the room. The maid, opened-mouthed and openeyed, waited for what might happen. The mistress entered the room noiselessly, and peered through the dusk at the sleeping figure in the arm-chair. Hackett was lying

definite, because more and more horrible, and at last it overwhelmed her so, that she rose in physical protest against it. She turned the gaslight to the full, and went anew over every sign before her. Hackett changed his posture, winking and muttering at the light, and she started behind the table instinctively to place some barrier between herself and him; but he settled back again in a mere second or two, and breathed more stertorously than before.

And now that she was awake to the terror of the position, she set her wits to work to find out what she might best do for the moment. There was no creature to whom she might run for advice or assistance, and she was thrown entirely upon her own resources. But she managed in a while to grasp the position pretty thoroughly. Above all other things, it was evident that no pity,

harsh, comfortless, or unfriendly. And thus, as was natural for a man in love, though it could only be absurd for any but a lover, the infant school was the scene of a most valorous slow tragedy, and the native instinct to hold body and soul together without a lapse from honour, became an enterprise purely angelic.

The passion which deified the girl naturally enough demonised the scoundrel who was her husband. To look at him fairly, Master Will was no more than despicable, but Blane was not in a position to assume a purely critical attitude. To him the unfaithful and selfish rascal stood mountainous, phenomenal, hideously deformed-hateful as the Great Napoleon, and the causer of woes as profound. Blane had carried a dull, slow despair so long that he had begun to think of himself as a man of a dull nature, but now that it began to be noised abroad that Hackett was back again and squandering his wife's substance, he began to hate with a heat and intensity which sometimes terrified him. The fierce loathing and revolt he sometimes felt at the bare existence of this poor and commonplace personage grown phenomenal would stab at him as if with the sudden anguish of a red-hot knife, and he would sicken and whirl with the intensity of his own hatred.

Resolutely hour by hour and day by day he had to fight against himself lest he should seek the man and lay upon him hands that could be nothing less than murderous. But to do the villain a damage would have been to rob himself of his own right to despise him. And beyond that, he had no right to interfere. He kept, in the very midst of his madness, self-possession enough to know that he could not quarrel with the husband without throwing an undeserved stigma upon the wife. What were they, Mary and he, to each other? What could they ever be? If the current of his love had flowed in a smooth channel it would certainly never have run dry, for there was a perennial spring of loyalty within the man; but the obstacles it encountered dammed it and held it in until it gathered strength and volume enough to go dashing and spraying in these wild cataracts of passion.

Since he had broken the bestial bond which for a little while had held him, he had fallen back into all the regular ways of his youth, and amongst other revived habits, was that of taking his mother to the old-fashioned Nonconformist chapel, in which she had worshipped, after her own shallow fashion, all

her life. He used to sit in sight of Mary Hackett there, and without criticising motives too closely, it is just possible that he continued that revived habit of his as much for the sake of seeing her, as for any reason which the pastor of the place might have found more solid.

It happened one gusty Sunday night in mid-winter, a month after Hackett's return, that he went to chapel alone, and returning homeward, overheard a phrase which, in its own due time, brought him the supreme temptation of his life.

The Bard was dutifully elbowing Hepzibah homeward, and the two were butting against the wind, head downward and shoulders squared, when Blane came up behind them. Hepzibah, with the wind in her ears, was unconscious of the footsteps in her rear, and shouting at Shadrach, said:

"Trust a woman for readin' a woman's heart. It's Master Ned her cares for."

The unwilling listener stood suddenly still, and all the blood in his body seemed to riot for a moment in his heart and head. He was conscious of nothing for awhile, and when he recovered himself, he was surprised to see the dark figures still but a little way in front of him. He seemed to have been absent from himself and them for a long time.

Hepzibah's voice reached him, blown backward by the wind.

"No." She was evidently answering some saying of Shadrach's which Blane had missed. "No harm'll come on't. Her's as good as gold, and so is he; but it's him as her's grown to care for, though it's a million to one her never guesses it.

Now Ned Blane had never played the eaves-dropper in his life before, but if all self-respect had hung for ever upon the issue of that temptation, he would have let it go. He had followed to hear, simply and purely because he could not do otherwise, but now that he had heard he stood still in the roaring wind.

If that were true!

The thought haunted him thereafter day and night and brought with it such temptations as the simplest-minded may fancy. Yet these were no temptations, for he would not dishonour her in his thoughts, however his own demon might strive with him.

But in a little while the true temptation came. That howling wind turned due north and blew for days. It bore bitter frost upon its wings and locked every stream and canal and lake and standing pond deep in black