n.

"I'll talk with your mother," said Uncle Oldways, getting up and
looking into his hat, as a man always does when he thinks of putting
it on presently. "Good-night. I suppose you are tired enough now.
I'll come again and see you."

Desire stood up and gave him her hand.

"I thank you, Uncle Titus, with all my heart."

He did not answer her a word; but he knew she meant it.

He did not stop that night to see his niece. He went home, to think
it over. But as he walked down Borden Street, swinging his big
stick, he said to himself,--

"Next of kin! Old Marmaduke Wharne was right. But it takes more than
the Family Bible to tell you which it is!"

Two days after, he had a talk with Mrs. Ledwith which relieved both
their minds.

From the brown-and-apricot drawing-room,--from among the things
that stood for nothing now, and had never stood for home,--he went
straight up, without asking, and knocked at Desire's third-story
door.

"Come in!" she said, without a note of expectation in her voice.

She had had a dull morning. Helena had brought her a novel from
Loring's that she could not read. Novels, any more than life, cannot
be read with very much patience, unless they touch something besides
surface. Why do critics--some of them--make such short, smart
work,--such cheerful, confident despatch, nowadays, of a story with
religion in it, as if it were an abnormity,--a thing with sentence
of death in itself, like a calf born with two heads,--that needs not
their trouble, save to name it as it is? Why, that is, if religion
stand for the relation of things to spirit, which I suppose it
should? Somebody said that somebody had written a book made up of
"spiritual struggles and strawberry short-cake." That was bright and
funny; and it seemed to settle the matter; but, taking strawberry
short-cake representatively, what else is human experience on earth
made up of? And are novels to be pictures of human experience, or
not?

This has nothing to do with present matters, however, except that
Desire found nothing real in her novel, and so had flung it aside,
and was sitting rather listlessly with her crochet which she never
cared much for, when Uncle Oldways entered.

Her face brightened instantly as he came in. He sat down just where
he had sat the other night. Mr. Oldways had a fashion of finding the
same seat a second time when he had come in once; he was a man who
took up most things where he left them off, and this