r station, and not there
yet! What a slow train this is!"

It was a slow train, and Tom, arriving at Ecclesfield, saw on the face
of the servant who admitted him that he was too late. In addition to
the solemn and mysterious hush that pervades a house in which the dead
lie yet unburied, a feeling of horror, the result of some unlooked-for
and additional calamity, seemed to predominate; and Tom was hardly
surprised, however much he might be shocked, when the old
butler gasped, in broken sentences, "Seizure--last night--quite
unconscious--all over this morning. Will you take some refreshment,
sir, after your journey?"

Mr. Bruce had been dead a few hours--dead without time to set his
house in order, without consciousness even to wish his child good-bye.

She came down to see Mr. Bargrave's clerk that afternoon, pale, calm,
collected, beautiful, but stern and unbending under the sorrow against
which her haughty nature rebelled. In a few words, referring to a
memorandum the while, she gave him her directions for the funeral and
its ceremonies; desired him to ascertain at once the state of her late
father's affairs, the amount of a succession to which she believed
herself entitled; begged he would return with full information that
day fortnight; ordered luncheon for him in the dining-room; and so
dismissed him as a bereaved queen might dismiss the humblest of her
subjects.

Tom Ryfe, returning to London by the next train, thought he had never
felt so small; and yet, was not this proud, sorrowing, and beautiful
young damsel the ideal he had been seeking hitherto in vain? It is
not too much to say that for twenty miles he positively _hated_ her,
striving fiercely against the influence, which yet he could not but
acknowledge. In another twenty, his good opinion of his best friend
Mr. Ryfe reasserted itself. He had seen something of the world, and
possessed, moreover, a certain shallow acquaintance with human nature,
not of the highest class, so he argued thus--

"Women like what they are unaccustomed to. The Grand Duchess of
Gerolstein makes love to a private soldier simply because she don't
know what a private soldier is. This girl must have lived amongst a
set of starched and stuck-up people who have not two ideas beyond
themselves and their order. She has never so much as seen a smart,
business-like, active fellow, ready to take all trouble off her hands,
and make up her mind for her before she can turn round--young, t