we should be happier, so--in a place of our
own."

"Well, I dare say we shall." She pauses for a moment. "Why are they in
town now--at this time of year? Why are they not in their country
house?"

"Ah! that is a last thorn in their flesh," says Monkton, with a quick
sigh. "They have had to let the old place to pay my brother's debts. He
is always a trouble to them. This last letter points to greater trouble
still."

"And in their trouble they have turned to you--to the little
grandchildren," says Joyce, softly. "One can understand it."

"Oh, yes. Oh, you should have told me," says Barbara, flushing as if
with pain. "I am the hardest person alive, I think. You think it?"
looking directly at her husband.

"I think only one thing of you," says Mr. Monkton, rising from the
breakfast table with a slight laugh. "It is what I have always thought,
that you are the dearest and loveliest thing on earth." The bantering
air he throws into this speech does not entirely deprive it of the
truthful tenderness that formed it. "There," says he, "that ought to
take the gloom off the brow of any well-regulated woman, coming as it
does from an eight-year-old husband."

"Oh, you must be older than that," says she, at which they all laugh
together.

"You are wise to go, Barbara," says Joyce, now in a livelier way, as if
that last quick, unexpected feeling of amusement has roused her to a
sharper sense of life. "If once they see you!--No, you mustn't put up
your shoulder like that--I tell you, if once they looked at you, they
would feel the measure of their folly."

"I shall end by fancying myself," says Mrs. Monkton, impatiently, "and
then you will all have fresh work cut out for you; the bringing of me
back to my proper senses. Well," with a sigh, "as I have to see them, I
wish----"

"What?"

"That I could be a heartier believer in your and Joyce's flattery, or
else, that they, your people, were not so prejudiced against me. It will
be an ordeal."

"When you are about it wish them a few grains of common sense," says her
husband wrathfully. "Just fancy the folly of an impertinence that
condemned a fellow being on no evidence whatsoever; neither eye nor ear
were brought in as witnesses."

"Oh, well," says she, considerably mollified by his defamation of his
people, "I dare say they are not so much to be blamed after all. And,"
with a little, quick laugh at her sister, "as Joyce says, my beauties
are still unknown to them; the