to her with a look of eagerness.

"Would it be any use? Suppose I got a place in one of the offices?
Would there be any hope for me?"

Mrs. Hannaford's eyes dropped.

"Don't think of her," she answered. "She has such brilliant
prospects--it is so unlikely. You think me unsympathetic--oh, I'm not!"
Again she let her fingers rest on his arm. "I feel so much with you
that I daren't offer imaginary hopes. She belongs to such a different
world, try, try to forget her."

"Of course I know she cares and thinks nothing about me now. But if I
made my way----"

"She will marry very early, and someone----"

With an upward movement of her hand the speaker, was sufficiently
explicit. Otway, he knew not why, tried to laugh, and frightened
himself with the sound.

"She is not the only girl, good and beautiful," Mrs. Hannaford
continued, pleading with him.

"For me she is," he replied, in a hard voice. "And I believe she will
be always."

For a minute or two the little warbler sang in silence, then Piers, of
a sudden, stood up, and strode hastily away.

Mrs. Hannaford fell into reverie. Her daughter was in London to-day,
her husband absent somewhere else. But she had not been solitary, for
Daniel Otway, failing to meet his brother, lingered a couple of hours
in the drawing-room. As she sat dreaming under the soft light, her face
relieved for the moment of its weariness and discontent, had a beauty
more touching than that of youth.

Upstairs, Piers found a letter awaiting him. He did not know the
writing, and found with surprise that it came from his brother
Alexander, who had addressed it to him through their father's
solicitor. Alexander wrote from the neighbourhood of Bloomsbury Square;
it was an odd letter, beginning formally, almost paternally, and
running off into chirruping facetiousness, as if the writer had tried
in vain to subdue his natural gaiety. There were extraordinary phrases.
"I congratulate you on being gazetted major in the regiment of Old
Time." "For my own part I am just beginning my thirty-fifth round with
knuckly life, and I rejoice to say that I have come up smiling.
Floorers I have suffered, not a few, in the rounds preceding, but I am
harder for it, harder and gamer." "Shall we not crack a bottle together
on this side of the circumfluent Oceanus?" And so on, to the effect
that Alexander much wished for a meeting with his brother, and urged
him to come to Theobald's Road as soon as possible, at hi