"He is alive," she said to herself with the same strange joy; for now she knew where he was, and what had happened to him. The silence of all these years was broken, the dead had come to life again, and the lost, in a sense, was found.

Fortune Williams rose up and walked, in more senses than one; went round to fetch her little girls, as she had promised, from that newly-opened delight of children, the Brighton Aquarium; stayed a little with them, admiring the fishes; and when she reached home and found David Dalziel in the drawing-room, met him and thanked him for bringing her the newspaper.

"" I suppose it was on account of that obituary notice of Mr. Roy's child," said she, calmly naming the name now. But still I am glad to well. So will you be. him?"

"What a sad thing! know he is alive and Shall you write to

"Well, I don't know," answered the lad, carelessly crumpling up the newspaper and

throwing it on the fire. Miss Williams made a faint movement to snatch it out, then disguised the gesture in some way, and silently watched it burn. "I don't quite see the use of writing. He's a family man now, and must have forgotten all about his old friends. Don't you think so?"

"Perhaps; only he was not the sort of person easily to forget."

She could defend him now; she could speak of him, and did speak, more than once afterwards, when David referred to the matter. Then the lad quitted Brighton for Oxford, and she was left in her old loneliness.

A loneliness, which I will not speak of. She herself never referred to that time. After it, she roused herself to begin her life anew in a fresh home, to work hard, not only for daily bread, but for that humble independence which she was determined to win before the dark hour when the most helpful become helpless, and the most independent are driven to fall a piteous burden into the charitable hands of

friends or strangers-a thing to her so terrible, that, to save herself from the possibility of it— she who had never leant upon anybody, never had anybody to lean on-became her one almost morbid desire.

She had no dread of a solitary old age, but an old age beholden to either public or private charity was to her intolerable; and she had now few years left her to work in-a governess's life wears women out very fast. She determined to begin to work again immediately, laying by as much as possible yearly, against the days when she could work no more; consulted Miss Maclachlan, who was most kind; and then sought, and was just about going to, another situation, with the highest salary she had yet earned, when an utterly unexpected change altered everything.

H

PART IV.

HE fly was already at the door, and Miss

THE

Williams, with her small luggage, would in five minutes have departed, followed by the good wishes of all the household, from Miss Maclachlan's school to her new situation, when the postman passed and left a letter for her.

"I will put it in my pocket and read it in the train," she said, with a slight change of colour. For she recognised the handwriting of that good man who had loved her, and whom she could not love.

"Better read it now. No time like the present," observed Miss Maclachlan.

Miss Williams did so. As soon as she was fairly started, and alone in the fly, she opened it; with hands slightly trembling, for she was touched by the persistence of the good rector, and his faithfulness to her, a poor governess,

when he might have married, as they said in his neighbourhood, "anybody." He would never marry anybody now-he was dying.

"I have come to feel how wrong I was," he wrote, "in ever trying to change our happy relations together. I have suffered for this- so have we all. But it is too late for regret now. My time has come. Do not grieve yourself by imagining it has come the faster through any decision of yours, but by slow inevitable disease, which the doctors have only lately discovered. Nothing could have saved me. Be satisfied that there is no cause for you to give yourself one minute's pain." (How she sobbed over those shaky lines, more even than over the newspaper lines which she had read that sunshiny morning on the shore!) "Remember only, that you made me very happy-me and all mine-for years; that I loved you, as even at my age a man can love; as I shall love you to the end, which cannot be very far off now. Would you dislike coming to see me just once again? My girls will be so very glad, and nobody will