ight have
appertained as easily to a man thirty years his junior as to himself,
and a countenance so renovated by faint moonlight as fairly to
correspond. It was with misgiving, therefore, that the sculptor ascended
the staircase and entered the little upper sitting-room, now arranged as
a sick-chamber.

Mrs. Pierston reclined on a sofa, her face emaciated to a surprising
thinness for the comparatively short interval since her attack. 'Come
in, sir,' she said, as soon as she saw him, holding out her hand. 'Don't
let me frighten you.'

Avice was seated beside her, reading. The girl jumped up, hardly seeming
to recognize him. 'O! it's Mr. Pierston,' she said in a moment, adding
quickly, with evident surprise and off her guard: 'I thought Mr.
Pierston was--'

What she had thought he was did not pass her lips, and it remained
a riddle for Jocelyn until a new departure in her manner towards him
showed that the words 'much younger' would have accurately ended the
sentence. Had Pierston not now confronted her anew, he might have
endured philosophically her changed opinion of him. But he was seeing
her again, and a rooted feeling was revived.

Pierston now learnt for the first time that the widow had been visited
by sudden attacks of this sort not infrequently of late years. They were
said to be due to angina pectoris, the latter paroxysms having been the
most severe. She was at the present moment out of pain, though weak,
exhausted, and nervous. She would not, however, converse about herself,
but took advantage of her daughter's absence from the room to broach the
subject most in her thoughts.

No compunctions had stirred her as they had her visitor on the
expediency of his suit in view of his years. Her fever of anxiety lest
after all he should not come to see Avice again had been not without
an effect upon her health; and it made her more candid than she had
intended to be.

'Troubles and sickness raise all sorts of fears, Mr. Pierston,' she
said. 'What I felt only a wish for, when you first named it, I have
hoped for a good deal since; and I have been so anxious that--that it
should come to something! I am glad indeed that you are come.'

'My wanting to marry Avice, you mean, dear Mrs. Pierston?'

'Yes--that's it. I wonder if you are still in the same mind? You are?
Then I wish something could be done--to make her agree to it--so as to
get it settled. I dread otherwise what will become of her. She is not a
practi