ent up for an occasional visit, and had become
the brightness of the house, and Susan's beloved partner in all her
works.

Her father, who understood better than did her mother and sister
what she had given up, had insisted on her having a sitting-room to
herself, which she embellished with the personal possessions she had
accumulated, and where she pursued her own avocations in the
forenoon, often indeed interrupted, but never showing, and not often
feeling, that it was to her hindrance, and indeed the family looked
on her work sufficiently as a profession, not only to acquiesce, but
to have a certain complacency in it, though it was a kind of
transparent fiction that MESA was an anagram of her initials and
that of Stokesley. Her mother at any rate believed that none of the
neighbours guessed at any such thing.

Stokesley was a good deal out of the world, five miles from the
station at Bonchamp, over hilly, stony roads, so that the cyclist
movement had barely reached it; the neighbourhood was sparse, and
Mrs. Merrifield's health had not been conducive to visiting, any
more than was her inclination, so that there was a little agitation
about first calls.

The newcomers appeared at church on Sunday at all the services. A
bright-faced girl of one-and-twenty, with little black eyes like
coals of fire, a tight ulster, like a riding habit, and a small
billycock hat, rather dismayed those who still held that bonnets
ought to be the Sunday gear of all beyond childhood; but the mother,
in rich black silk, was unexceptionable.

Refusing to be marshalled up the aisle to the seat which persistent
tradition assigned to the Gap in the aristocratic quarter, daughter
and mother (it was impossible not thus to call them) sat themselves
down on the first vacant place, close to a surviving white smock-
frock, and blind to the bewildered glances of his much-bent friend
in velveteen, who, hobbling in next after, found himself displaced
and separated alike from his well-thumbed prayer and hymn book and
the companion who found the places for him.

'It ain't fitty like,' said the old man confidentially to Susan,
'nor the ladies wouldn't like it when we comes in with our old coats
all of a muck with wet.'

'The principle is right,' said Bessie, when this was repeated to
her; 'but practice ought to wait till native manners and customs are
learnt.'

The two sisters offered to save their mother the first visit--leave
her card, or make