h the firm conviction that there is a time of fulfillment
to come in our two lives. Happen what may in the interval--I trust the
future."

The words had barely passed his lips when the voice of one of the
servants reached them from the house. "Miss Emily, are you in the
garden?"

Emily stepped out into the sunshine. The servant hurried to meet her,
and placed a telegram in her hand. She looked at it with a sudden
misgiving. In her small experience, a telegram was associated with the
communication of bad news. She conquered her hesitation--opened it--read
it. The color left her face: she shuddered. The telegram dropped on the
grass.

"Read it," she said, faintly, as Alban picked it up.

He read these words: "Come to London directly. Miss Letitia is
dangerously ill."

"Your aunt?" he asked.

"Yes--my aunt."

BOOK THE SECOND--IN LONDON.

CHAPTER XII. MRS. ELLMOTHER.

The metropolis of Great Britain is, in certain respects, like no other
metropolis on the face of the earth. In the population that throngs the
streets, the extremes of Wealth and the extremes of Poverty meet, as
they meet nowhere else. In the streets themselves, the glory and the
shame of architecture--the mansion and the hovel--are neighbors in
situation, as they are neighbors nowhere else. London, in its social
aspect, is the city of contrasts.

Toward the close of evening Emily left the railway terminus for the
place of residence in which loss of fortune had compelled her aunt
to take refuge. As she approached her destination, the cab passed--by
merely crossing a road--from a spacious and beautiful Park, with its
surrounding houses topped by statues and cupolas, to a row of cottages,
hard by a stinking ditch miscalled a canal. The city of contrasts: north
and south, east and west, the city of social contrasts.

Emily stopped the cab before the garden gate of a cottage, at the
further end of the row. The bell was answered by the one servant now in
her aunt's employ--Miss Letitia's maid.

Personally, this good creature was one of the ill-fated women whose
appearance suggests that Nature intended to make men of them and altered
her mind at the last moment. Miss Letitia's maid was tall and gaunt and
awkward. The first impression produced by her face was an impression of
bones. They rose high on her forehead; they projected on her cheeks;
and they reached their boldest development in her jaws. In the cavernous
eyes of this unfortun