sses' Homes," where every body
was very kind to her--some more than kind, affectionate. It was strange,
she often thought, what an endless amount of affection followed her
wherever she went. She was by no means one of those women who go about
the world moaning that nobody loves them. Every body loved her, and she
knew it--every body whose love was worth having--except Robert Roy.

Still her mind never changed; not even when, in the weakness of illness,
there would come vague dreams of that peaceful rectory, with its quiet
rooms and green garden; of the gentle, kindly hearted father, and the two
loving girls whom she could have made so happy, and perhaps won happiness
herself in the doing of it.

"I am a great fool, some people would say," thought she, with a sad
smile; "perhaps rather worse. Perhaps I am acting absolutely wrong in
throwing away my chance of doing good. But I can not help it--I can not
help it."

So she kept to her resolution, writing the occasional notes she had
promised to write to her poor forsaken girls, without saying a word of
her illness; and when she grew better, though not strong enough to
undertake a new situation, finding her money slipping away--though, with
her good salaries and small wants, she was not poor, and had already
begun to lay up for a lonely old age--she accepted this temporary
home at Miss Maclachlan's, at Brighton. Was it--so strange are the
under-currents which guide one's outward life--was it because she had
found a curious charm in the old lady's Scotch tongue, unheard for years?
That the two little pupils were Indian children, and that the house was
at the seaside?--and she had never seen the sea since she left St.
Andrews.

It was going back to the days of her youth to sit, as now, watching the
sunshine glitter on the far-away ocean. The very smell of the sea-weed,
the lap-lap of the little waves, brought back old recollections so
vividly--old thoughts, some bitter, some sweet, but the sweetness
generally over-coming the bitterness.

"I have had all the joy that the world could bestow;
I have lived--I have loved."

So sings the poet, and truly. Though to this woman love had brought not
joy, but sorrow, still she had loved, and it had been the main-stay and
stronghold of her life, even though to outsiders it might have appeared
little better than a delusion, a dream. Once, and by one only, her whole
nature had been drawn out, her ideal of moral right e