egin with a success, it is proof that he
has at least some hopes of me."

"I am glad indeed, Cuthbert. I shan't be quite so sorry now as I have
been about your losing Fairclose. It is so much nobler to work than it
is to fritter away a life doing nothing. How tiresome it is," she said,
"that you have taken this unfortunate idea in your head of joining a
French corps. It will unsettle you altogether."

"Really," he broke in with a laugh, "I must protest against being
considered so weak and unstable. You had a perfect right in thinking me
lazy, but I don't think you have any right in considering me a reed to
be shaken by every passing wind. I can assure you that I am very fixed
in my resolves. I was content to be lazy before simply because there was
no particular reason for my being otherwise, and I admit that
constitutionally I may incline that way; but when a cataclysm occurred,
and, as I may say, the foundations were shaken, it became necessary for
me to work, and I took a resolution to do so, and have stuck to it.
Possibly I should have done so in any case. You see when a man is told
by a young lady he is a useless idler, who does but cumber the earth, it
wakes him up a little."

"I am sure I didn't say that," Mary said, indignantly, but with a hot
flush on her cheeks.

"Not in those precise words, but you spoke to that effect, and my
conscience told me you were not far wrong in your opinion. I had begun
to meditate whether I ought not to turn over a new leaf when I came in
suddenly for Fairclose; that of course seemed to knock it all on the
head. Then came what we may call the smash. This was so manifestly an
interposition of Providence in the direction of my bestirring myself
that I took the heroic resolution to work."

Mary felt that it was desirable to avoid continuing the subject. She had
long since come to regard that interview in the garden as a sort of
temporary aberration on his part, and that although, perhaps, sincere at
the moment, he had very speedily come to laugh at his own folly, and had
recognized that the idea was altogether ridiculous. Upon her it had made
so little impression that it had scarcely occurred to her when they met,
that any passage of the sort had taken place, and had welcomed him as
the lad she had known as a child, rather than as the man who had, under
a passing impulse, asked her to marry him.

"I think," she said suddenly, "I will fetch Madame Michaud in. It will
be nice for