nd pleasant letter enough, seemed necessary to vouch for
them. She read and re-read it. The little room seemed too small and
close for her. She opened the window to let in the white daylight,
undisguised by the faint green tint of the glass, and she leaned out to
breathe the fresh sweet air of the spring morning. Life was very
pleasurable to her to-day.

There were golden gleams too upon the future. She would no longer be the
unknown wife of a country banker, moving in a narrow sphere, which was
altogether painful to her in its provincial philistinism. It was a
sphere to which she had descended in girlish ignorance. Her uncle, Lord
Riversdale, had been willing to let his portionless niece marry this
prosperous young banker, who was madly in love with her, and a little
gentle pressure had been brought to bear on the girl of eighteen, who
had been placed by her father's death in a position of dependence. Since
then a smouldering fire of ambition and of dissatisfaction with her lot
had been lurking unsuspected under her cold and self-absorbed manner.

But her thoughts turned with more tenderness than usual toward her
husband. She had aroused in him also a restless spirit of ambition,
though in him it was for her sake, not his own. He wished to restore her
if possible to the position she had sacrificed for him; and Felicita
knew it. Her heart beating faster with her success was softened toward
him; and tears suffused her dark eyes for an instant as she thought of
his astonishment and exultation.

The children were at play in the garden below her, and their merry
voices greeted her ear pleasantly. The one human being who really dwelt
in her inmost heart was her boy Felix, her first-born child. Hilda was
an unnecessary supplement to the page of her maternal love. But for
Felix she dreamed day-dreams of extravagant aspiration; no lot on earth
seemed too high or too good for him. He was a handsome boy, the very
image of her father, the late Lord Riversdale, and now as she gazed down
on him, her eyes slightly dewed with tears, he looked up to her window.
She kissed her hand to him, and the boy waved his little cap toward her
with almost passionate gesticulations of delight. Felix would be a great
man some day; this book of hers was a stone in the foundation of his
fame as well as of her own.

It was upon this mood of exultation, a rare mood for Felicita, that the
cry and roar from the street had broken. With a half-smile at h