use for your bad night. We shall see you
refreshed to-morrow, and not wishing yourself at home.'

'Don't think that I wish that. Home is gone for ever.'

'Home may be gone higher--up to the real Home,' said Ethel, blushing
with the effort at the hint, and coming down to earthlier consolations,
'but even the fragments will grow into home again here, and you will
feel very differently.'

Leonard did not answer; but after a pause said, 'Miss May, is not it a
horrid pity girls should go to school?'

'I am no judge, Leonard.'

'You see,' said the boy, 'after the little girls were born, my mother
had no time for Ave, and sent her to Brighton, and there she begged to
stay on one half after another, learning all sorts of things; but only
coming home for short holidays, like company, for us to wonder at her
and show her about, thinking herself ever so much in advance of my poor
mother, and now she knows just nothing at all of her!'

'You cannot tell, Leonard, and I am sure she has been devoted to you.'

'If she had stayed at home like you, she might have known how to let
one alone. Oh, you can't think what peace it was yesterday!'

'Was it peace? I feared it was desertion.'

'It is much better to be by oneself, than always worried. To have them
always at me to get up my spirits when the house is miserable--'

'Ah,' said Ethel, 'I remember your mother rejoicing that she had not to
send you from home, and saying you were always so kind and gentle to
her.'

'Did she!' cried the boy, eagerly. 'Oh, but she forgot--' and he hid
his face, the features working with anguish.

'So pleased and proud she used to look, walking with you on Saturday
afternoons.'

'Those Saturdays! They were the only walks she ever would take; but
she would always come with me.'

More followed in the same strain, and Ethel began to gather more
distinct impressions of the Ward family. She saw that her present
charge was warm and sound-hearted, and that the strength of his
affections had been chiefly absorbed by the homely housewifely mother,
comparatively little esteemed by the modernized brother and sister. Of
the loss of his father he seemed to think less; it seemed, indeed,
rather to reconcile him to that of his mother, by the grief it spared
her; and it confirmed Ethel's notion, that Mr. Ward, a busy and dull
man, paid no great attention to his children between the plaything
period and that of full development. The mother was the h