tion of a common life in
her house, Ike had ill-used her, till fortunately, the business to which
Jocelyn had assisted him chancing to prosper, he became immersed in
its details, and allowed Avice to pursue her household courses without
interference, initiating that kind of domestic reconciliation which is
so calm and durable, having as its chief ingredient neither hate nor
love, but an all-embracing indifference.

At first Pierston had sent her sums of money privately, fearing lest
her husband should deny her material comforts; but he soon found, to his
great relief, that such help was unnecessary, social ambition prompting
Ike to set up as quite a gentleman-islander, and to allow Avice a scope
for show which he would never have allowed in mere kindness.

Being in Rome, as aforesaid, Pierston returned one evening to his
hotel to dine, after spending the afternoon among the busts in the long
gallery of the Vatican. The unconscious habit, common to so many people,
of tracing likes in unlikes had often led him to discern, or to fancy
he discerned, in the Roman atmosphere, in its lights and shades, and
particularly in its reflected or secondary lights, something resembling
the atmosphere of his native promontory. Perhaps it was that in each
case the eye was mostly resting on stone--that the quarries of ruins in
the Eternal City reminded him of the quarries of maiden rock at home.

This being in his mind when he sat down to dinner at the common table,
he was surprised to hear an American gentleman, who sat opposite,
mention the name of Pierston's birthplace. The American was talking to
a friend about a lady--an English widow, whose acquaintance they had
renewed somewhere in the Channel Islands during a recent tour, after
having known her as a young woman who came to San Francisco with her
father and mother many years before. Her father was then a rich man just
retired from the business of a stone-merchant in the Isle of Slingers;
but he had engaged in large speculations, and had lost nearly all his
fortune. Jocelyn further gathered that the widowed daughter's name was
Mrs. Leverre; that she had a step-son, her husband having been a Jersey
gentleman, a widower; and that the step-son seemed to be a promising and
interesting young man.

Pierston was instantly struck with the perception that these and other
allusions, though general, were in accord with the history of his
long-lost Marcia. He hardly felt any desire to hunt h