ontinued persuasively, sitting up in his chair, 'us
ignored young Fred for more till twenty year. And it wasna' right.
Hannah said it wasna' right as Fred should suffer for his mother and his
grandfeyther. And then us give Fred and your John an equal chance, and
John's lost, and now John isna' satisfied, by all accounts.' She gazed
at him with a gentle smile. 'Why dostna' speak, lass?'

'What am I to say, uncle?'

'Wouldst like me to make a new will, and halve it between John and Fred?
It wouldna' be fair to Fred, not rightly fair, because he's run his risk
for th' lot. But wouldst like it, lass?'

There was a trace of the old vitality in his shrivelled features, as he
laid this offering on the altar of her feminine charm.

'Oh, do, uncle!' she was about to say eagerly, but she thought in the
same instant of John standing over Meshach's body, with the ice-cold
cloth in his hand, and something, some dim instinct of a fundamental
propriety, prevented her from uttering those words. 'I would like you to
do whatever you think right,' she answered with calmness.

Meshach was evidently disappointed.

'I shall see,' he ejaculated. And after a pause, 'John's i' smooth water
again, isn't he? I meant to ask Dain.'

'I think so,' said Leonora.

She had become restive. Soon afterwards she bade him good-night and
departed. And all the way up to Hillport she speculated upon the chances
of finding Arthur in her drawing-room when she got home.

* * * * *

As she passed through the hall she knew at once that Arthur was not in
the house and had not been there; and the agitation of her heart
subsided suddenly into the melancholy stillness of defeated hope. She
sadly admitted that she no longer knew herself, and that the Leonora of
old had been supplanted by a creature of incalculable moods, a feeble
victim of strange crises of secret folly. Through the open door of the
drawing-room she could see Rose reading, and Millicent searching among
a pile of music on the piano. Bessie emerged from the dining-room with a
white cloth and the crumb-tray.

'Master's in there,' said Bessie; 'they didn't wait tea, ma'am.'

Leonora went into the dining-room, where John sat alone at the bare
mahogany, smoking. With her deep knowledge of him, she detected
instantly that he had been annoyed by her absence from tea. The
condition of the sharp end of his cigar showed that he was perturbed,
fretful, and perhaps in a s