so glum that he has hardly opened his lips to
me ever since!' said Wych Hazel in an aggrieved voice.

'Perhaps Mr. Falkirk has something upon his mind, my dear!'
said Dr. Maryland, with raised eyebrows and an uncommon
expression of _fun_ playing about the lines of his mouth. 'It is
not always safe to conclude that coincident facts have a
relation of cause and effect.'

'No--' said the girl, 'I suppose not. But I stood there all by
myself and heard him turn the keys and rattle the bolts--and
then I ran upstairs to find Mrs. Bywank,--and of course she
couldn't speak for a toothache. And then I felt as if there
was nobody in all the world--in all my world--but me!'

Dr. Maryland looked tenderly upon the young girl beside him,
yet uncomprehendingly. Probably his peculiar masculine nature
furnished him with no clue to her essentially feminine views
of things.

'I dare say, my dear,' he said,--'I dare say! The best cure for
such a state of feeling hat I know, would be to begin living
for other people. You will find the world grow populous very
soon. And one other cure,'--he added, his eye going away from
Wych Hazel into an abstracted gaze towards the outer world;--
'when you can say, "Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there
is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee." '

The little hand upon his shoulder stirred,--was lifted, and
laid down again. Somehow she comprehended him better than he
did her. Then with a sudden motion Hazel took off a luminous
bracelet--one of the three she always wore, and laid it across
Dr. Maryland's hand.

'Did mamma ever shew you that, sir?' she said. 'She had it
made just for me. And then my wrist was so small that it would
go twice round.'

It was a string of twelve stones, all different, all cut and
set alike; each long parallelogram fitting rather closely to
the next on either side; the hues--opaque, translucent,
clouded--flashed and gleamed with every imaginable variation of
colour and shade. The doctor looked at it in silence. Then
spoke.

'What did she mean by it, Hazel, my dear? I do not catch the
interpretation.'

She turned it a little in his hand, until the light fell on
the gold framing beneath the gems, and Dr. Maryland could read
the fine graven tracery:--"The first, a jasper."

'Ah!' he exclaimed with new interest, 'I see.' And he took up
the chain of stones and turned it over and over, rather passed
it through his fingers like a rosary, studying the stones and