igence of the return of The Honourable Mrs.
Northbrook's long-absent husband was soon received with comparative calm.

A few days more brought Christmas, and the forlorn home of Laura
Northbrook blazed from basement to attic with light and cheerfulness. Not
that the house was overcrowded with visitors, but many were present, and
the apathy of a dozen years came at length to an end. The animation
which set in thus at the close of the old year did not diminish on the
arrival of the new; and by the time its twelve months had likewise run
the course of its predecessors, a son had been added to the dwindled line
of the Northbrook family.

* * * * *

At the conclusion of this narrative the Spark was thanked, with a manner
of some surprise, for nobody had credited him with a taste for
tale-telling. Though it had been resolved that this story should be the
last, a few of the weather-bound listeners were for sitting on into the
small hours over their pipes and glasses, and raking up yet more episodes
of family history. But the majority murmured reasons for soon getting to
their lodgings.

It was quite dark without, except in the immediate neighbourhood of the
feeble street-lamps, and before a few shop-windows which had been hardily
kept open in spite of the obvious unlikelihood of any chance customer
traversing the muddy thoroughfares at that hour.

By one, by two, and by three the benighted members of the Field-Club rose
from their seats, shook hands, made appointments, and dropped away to
their respective quarters, free or hired, hoping for a fair morrow. It
would probably be not until the next summer meeting, months away in the
future, that the easy intercourse which now existed between them all
would repeat itself. The crimson maltster, for instance, knew that on
the following market-day his friends the President, the Rural Dean, and
the bookworm would pass him in the street, if they met him, with the
barest nod of civility, the President and the Colonel for social reasons,
the bookworm for intellectual reasons, and the Rural Dean for moral ones,
the latter being a staunch teetotaller, dead against John Barleycorn. The
sentimental member knew that when, on his rambles, he met his friend the
bookworm with a pocket-copy of something or other under his nose, the
latter would not love his companionship as he had done to-day; and the
President, the aristocrat, and the farmer knew that affairs political,
sporting, dome