alling the primary one of
the nib upon the paper.

'Mamma,' said the younger lady, 'here I am at last.'

A writer's mind in the midst of a sentence being like a ship at sea,
knowing no rest or comfort till safely piloted into the harbour of a full
stop, Lady Petherwin just replied with 'What,' in an occupied tone, not
rising to interrogation. After signing her name to the letter, she
raised her eyes.

'Why, how late you are, Ethelberta, and how heated you look!' she said.
'I have been quite alarmed about you. What do you say has happened?'

The great, chief, and altogether eclipsing thing that had happened was
the accidental meeting with an old lover whom she had once quarrelled
with; and Ethelberta's honesty would have delivered the tidings at once,
had not, unfortunately, all the rest of her attributes been dead against
that act, for the old lady's sake even more than for her own.

'I saw a great cruel bird chasing a harmless duck!' she exclaimed
innocently. 'And I ran after to see what the end of it would be--much
further than I had any idea of going. However, the duck came to a pond,
and in running round it to see the end of the fight, I could not remember
which way I had come.'

'Mercy!' said her mother-in-law, lifting her large eyelids, heavy as
window-shutters, and spreading out her fingers like the horns of a snail.
'You might have sunk up to your knees and got lost in that swampy
place--such a time of night, too. What a tomboy you are! And how did
you find your way home after all!'

'O, some man showed me the way, and then I had no difficulty, and after
that I came along leisurely.'

'I thought you had been running all the way; you look so warm.'

'It is a warm evening. . . . Yes, and I have been thinking of old times
as I walked along,' she said, 'and how people's positions in life alter.
Have I not heard you say that while I was at Bonn, at school, some family
that we had known had their household broken up when the father died, and
that the children went away you didn't know where?'

'Do you mean the Julians?'

'Yes, that was the name.'

'Why, of course you know it was the Julians. Young Julian had a day or
two's fancy for you one summer, had he not?--just after you came to us,
at the same time, or just before it, that my poor boy and you were so
desperately attached to each other.'

'O yes, I recollect,' said Ethelberta. 'And he had a sister, I think. I
wonder where they went to li