no end
of speculation over Mr. Roy--sometimes meeting, as they were sure to do,
and walking home together, with the moonlight shining down the empty
streets, and the stars out by myriads over the silent distant sea, while
the nearer tide came washing in upon the sands--all was so like, so
frightfully like, old times that it was very sore to bear.

But, as I have said, Miss Williams was Miss Williams, and Mr. Roy Mr.
Roy, and there were her two girls always besides them; also his two boys,
who soon took to "Auntie" as naturally as if they were really hers, or
she theirs.

"I think they had better call you so, as the others do," said Mr. Roy one
day. "Are these young ladies really related to you?"

"No; but I promised their father on his death-bed to take charge of them.
That is all."

"He is dead, then. Was he a great friend of yours?"

She felt the blood flashing all over her face, but she answered,
steadily: "Not a very intimate friend, but I respected him exceedingly.
He was a good man. His daughters had a heavy loss when he died, and I
am glad to be a comfort to them so long as they need me."

"I have no doubt of it."

This was the only question he ever asked her concerning her past life,
though, by slow degrees, he told her a good deal of his own. Enough to
make her quite certain, even if her keen feminine instinct had not
already divined the fact, that whatever there might have been in it of
suffering, there was nothing in the smallest degree either to be ashamed
of or to hide. What Robert Roy of Shanghai had written about him had
continued true. As he said one day to her, "We never stand still. We
either grow better or worse. You have not grown worse."

Nor had he. All that was good in him had developed, all his little
faults had toned down. The Robert Roy of today was slightly different
from, but in no wise inferior to, the Robert Roy of her youth. She saw
it, and rejoiced in the seeing.

What he saw in her she could not tell. He seemed determined to rest
wholly in the present, and take out of it all the peace and pleasantness
that he could. In the old days, when the Dalziel boys were naughty, and
Mrs. Dalziel tiresome; and work was hard, and holidays were few, and life
was altogether the rough road that it often seems to the young, he had
once called her "Pleasantness and Peace." He never said so now; but
sometimes he looked it.

Many an evening he came and sat by her fireside, in the arm