ake, to
set an example, and her servants leave her regularly every
month.

'Well, we shall see. I run on like this, because you say you
like to be gossipped to; and I am just a little lonely
here--sometimes. Good-night, and good-bye.--Your devoted
sister,

'ELIZABETH.'

CHAPTER IV

'Come in!' said Alice Gaddesden in a languid tone. From the knock,
sharp and loud, on her bedroom door, she guessed that it was her
sister Margaret who wished to see her. She did not wish, however, to
see Margaret at all. Margaret, who was slightly the elder, tired and
coerced her. But she had no choice.

Mrs. Strang entered briskly.

'My dear Alice! what a time of day to be in bed! Are you really
ill?'

Mrs. Gaddesden grew red with annoyance.

'I thought I had told you, Margaret, that Dr. Crother advised me
more than a year ago not to come down till the middle of the
morning. It rests my heart.'

Mrs. Strang, who had come up to the bedside, looked down upon her
sister with amused eyes. She herself was curiously like the Squire,
even as to her hair, which was thick and fair, and already
whitening, though she was not yet thirty. Human thinness could
hardly have been carried further than she and the Squire achieved
it. She had her father's nose also. But the rest of her features
were delicately regular, and her quick blue eyes were those of a
woman who told no falsehoods herself, and had little patience with
other people's.

'My dear Alice, why do you believe doctors? They always tell you
what you want to hear. I am sure you told Dr. Crother exactly what
to say,' said Margaret, laughing, as she placed a chair by the
bedside.

'Oh, of course I know you think everybody's a sham who isn't as
strong as yourself!' said Mrs. Gaddesden, sinking back on her
pillows with a soft sigh of resignation. 'Though I think you _might_
have remembered the horribly hard work I've been doing lately.'

'Have you?' Mrs. Strang wrinkled her brow, as though in an effort to
recollect. 'Oh, yes, I know. I have always been getting notices
lately with your name on them, at the end of a long tail beginning
with a Duchess, and stuffed with Countesses. And I always
think--there's Alice doing the work, and the Countesses getting the
glory. Do you really do the work?'

And Margaret, who did not often see her sister, and was of a
genuinely inquiring turn of mind, turned upon her a penetrating
look.

'Well, of cou