ll, the tall white
lilies in the garden that stood like fairies guarding the house, and the
pear-tree that was laden with fruit.

He remembered how his mother had sat in that porch with him, reading
stories to him out of the Bible, but often lifting her sad pale face and
looking down the road as if watching for some one.

And then there came a dark, dreary night, when the wind was howling
mournfully round the cottage and their mother lay dying. She had called
Raymond to her, and had pressed her cold lips on his forehead, telling
him to take care of Madge; and if his father ever came, to say that she
had loved him to the end, and she had prayed God to bless him and to
take care of her children. Then she had died, and the neighbours told
Raymond that he was motherless.

[Illustration: THE DYING MOTHER.]

He recollected how the sun shone brightly on the day that she was
buried, and that he and Madge stood by the grave crying, when she was
put down in the cold earth; and that a man rode up to the paling of the
quiet green churchyard, and threw the reins over his horse's neck, and
came with hurried footsteps to the grave just as the last sod was thrown
upon the coffin; and how this man had sobbed and cried, and had caught
them in his arms, and said, "My poor little motherless ones," and had
kissed them and cried again so piteously and wildly, that the clergyman
had stopped in the service and had tried to comfort him. And when the
funeral was over, and the neighbours were taking the little ones home,
how the man had held them tightly and said, "No; mine now, never to
leave me again. I am their father. Margaret, I will try to make up to
them what I withheld from you; is it too late?"

This was the father whom their mother had spoken of with her dying
breath; but who had come too late to implore her forgiveness for having
left her in want, while he squandered his money upon his own pleasure.
But now, in the impulse of grief and remorse, he had determined to act
differently, and returned to London with his children.

Here they had lived ever since. Their father had returned to his old gay
life, and left the children very much to take care of themselves.
Sometimes carelessly kind to them, more often harsh and impatient, Mr.
Leicester supposed that he fulfilled the vow which he had made about her
children, beside his wife's grave.

Raymond and Madge had no very definite idea as to what their father did
with his time. From