be there to witness their confusion. Yet
other sufferers since Job have found that the oldest friends do not
necessarily of er the most acceptable consolation.

"Oh, oh! I feel like to die of grief!" wailed poor Mrs. Gallosh.

"Aye; it's an awful smack in the eye for you," said Mr. Rentoul sagely.

"Smack in the eye!" thundered his host. "It's a criminal offence--that's
what it is! It's a damned swindle! It's a----"

"Oh, hush, hush!" interrupted Mrs. Rentoul in a shocked voice. "What
words for a lady to hear! After all, you must remember you never made
any inquiries."

"Inquiries! What for should I be making inquiries about my guests? YOU
never dropped a word of such a thing! Who'd have listened if I had? It
was just Lord Tulliwuddle this and Lord Tulliwuddle that from morning to
night since ever he came to the Castle."

"Duncan's so simple-minded," groaned Mrs. Gallosh.

"And what were you, I'd like to know? What were you?" retorted her
justly incensed spouse. "Never a word did I hear, but just that he was
such an aristocratic young man, and any one could see he had blue blood
in his veins, and stuff of that kind!"

"I more than once had my own doubts about that," said the alcohol expert
with a knowing wink. "There was something about him---- Ah, well, he was
not exactly my own idea of a lord."

"YOUR idea?" scoffed his oldest and best of friends. "What do YOU know
of lords, I'd like to know?"

"Well, well," answered the sage peaceably, "maybe we've neither of us
had much opportunity of judging of the nobility. It's just more bad luck
than anything else that you should have gone to the expense of setting
up in style in a lord's castle and then having this downcome. If I'd had
similar ambeetions it might have been me."

This soft answer was so far from turning away wrath, that Mrs. Rentoul
again felt compelled to stem the tide of her host's eloquence.

"Oh, hush!" she exclaimed; "I'd have fancied you'd be having no thoughts
beyond your daughter's affliction."

"My Eva! my poor Eva! Where is the suffering child?" cried Mrs. Gallosh.
"Duncan, what'll she be doing?"

"Making a to-do like the rest of the women-folk," replied her husband,
with rather less sympathy than the occasion seemed to demand.

In point of fact Eva had disappeared from the company immediately after
hearing the contents of Mr. Maddison's letter, and whatever she had been
doing, it had not been weeping alone, for at that moment she ran