pearance than many of its more modern neighbours, with
their dismal monotony and pretentiousness. It faced a well-kept
enclosure, with trim lawns and beds, and across the compact laurel
hedges in the little front gardens a curious passer-by might catch
glimpses of various interiors which in nearly every case left him with
an impression of cosy comfort. The outline of the terrace was broken
here and there by little verandahs protecting the shallow balconies
and painted a deep Indian-red or sap-green, which in summer time were
gay with flowers and creepers, and one seldom passed there then on
warm and drowsy afternoons without undergoing a well-sustained fire
from quite a masked battery of pianos, served from behind the
fluttering white curtains at most of the long open windows on the
first floor.

Even in winter and at night the terrace was cheerful, with its variety
of striped and coloured blinds and curtains at the illuminated
windows; and where blinds and curtains were undrawn and the little
front rooms left unlighted, the firelight flickering within on shining
bookcases and picture frames was no less pleasantly suggestive. Still,
in every neighbourhood there will always be some houses whose
exteriors are severely unattractive; without being poverty-stricken,
they seem to belong to people indifferent to all but the absolutely
essential, and incapable of surrounding themselves with any of the
characteristic contrivances that most homes which are more than mere
lodgings amass almost unconsciously. It was before a house of this
latter kind that Mark stopped--a house with nothing in the shape of a
verandah to relieve its formality. Behind its front railings there
were no trim laurel bushes--only an uncomfortable bed of equal parts
of mould and broken red tiles, in which a withered juniper was dying
hard; at the windows were no bright curtain-folds or hanging baskets
of trailing fern to give a touch of colour, but dusty wire blinds and
hangings of a faded drab.

It was not a boarding-house, but the home in which Mark Ashburn lived
with his family, who, if they were not precisely gay, were as
respectable as any in the terrace, which is better in some respects
than mere gaiety.

He found them all sitting down to dinner in the back parlour, a
square little room with a grey paper of a large and hideous design.
His mother, a stout lady with a frosty complexion, a cold grey eye,
and an injured expression about the mouth and