us.

As I said, our grandfather had not hitherto taken much notice of That morning it seemed as if he thoroughly took in Gladys for the first time. He looked at her in a fixed considering way, followed with his eyes the motions of her tall, rather full figure, drew some conclusion or other from his observations-perhaps was struck, as I had been, by the combined freshness and ripeness about her whole person. For want, I suppose, of anything else to say, Gladys announced during the meal (silent for the most part, as all our meals had been at Colwyn) that she was going to walk over the hills to a certain village she mentioned five or six miles away.

In

It might have been Gladys's independent tone that irritated Mr Colwyn. It had not surprised me; I know Gladys's way. She is not really wilful-not more than any one ought to be. stantly our grandfather insisted that Gladys should not go as she had said; that the roads were not safe for a young girl to walk so far alone. He could not have said anything less likely to turn Gladys from her purpose. "It was absurd to make any difficulty about it," she answered; "but, for company's sake, she would take Hoel with her." Hoel was a

VOL. CXLIX.-NO. DCCCCIV.

bloodhound of our grandfather's, and Gladys had made friends with him. Perhaps the very fact of her having done so was another offence to his old master, whose irritation rose into passion at Gladys's last remark. His eyes literally flashed fire, and I was more puzzled than ever about his eyes. They looked dead generally, cased over as if there was no passage through them either way; now the fire leaped through. I wondered Gladys didn't give in. There, indeed, the old ogre was revealed to us. It was grand to see how quiet Gladys kept under his torrent of words; she didn't flare up; she just took no heed of him at all, and I knew by that what she intended to do.

Mr Colwyn was not a busy man. He lounged away the greater part of the mornings in his study, library, or smokingroom, whatever one might call his own peculiar den. He was something of a reader, I believe. Sometimes he would have his bailiff in to talk to, and sometimes he wandered about the place; but he kept his head down out of doors, and never looked at anything. Perhaps he disliked to see how shabby all his belongings had become. He was a magistrate, we heard that morning for the first time; and it also came out that he was going to be away the whole day at a meeting in the nearest town. As soon as he was gone, I slank off towards the garden without looking at Gladys; but very soon I heard the bang of the garden-door in the wall, and recognised Hoel's bark, and a clear tone or two reached me

Gladys's voice talking to him. After that I pushed my way through bushes of guelder - rose and seringa and laburnums, all shabby and seeded by this time,

P

past many trailing thorns of sweet-brier, until I came to the only part of the garden which bore the least resemblance to the "sweet trim place" of mother's stories. This was a straight grass walk between rows of rose-trees. It was hedged in by taller shrubs on either side, and was beautifully sheltered and quiet. At one end of the walk there was a summer-house, from which, looking through the rose-trees, one saw the upper windows of that half of the house which stood the highest. At that time of the year the summer-house was a bower of honeysuckle, whose flowers hung over and round it in bunches. I walked down the grass walk towards this resting-place, lingering as I went to enjoy the sunshine and drink the sweetness of the air. The feeling of the rest here, and the consciousness I still had of the combat in Gladys's mind, struck me with a sense of contrast, and then suddenly I felt as if I had slipped back into the lives of another pair-the brother and sister whose history had been divided between the same combats and the same rest. On such a morning as this, I thought to my self, our mother in this very same place was shaken by the same tremor that troubles me to-dayconscious of a gathering contest of wills, dreading it, taking pause of serene enjoyment as I am doing this moment between the storms; and then the tension dropped a little, and I called up a day all clear from dawn to sunset, and breathed the joy of the children, open, undisturbed. "On such a day," I exclaimed, and I stood for a moment to take in all the lovely surroundings, "mother walked between the rose - trees with afrozen corpse !" The image came suddenly across my mind, and the

outward sunshine could not overpower it. So I hurried on to the summer-house, and sat down there and tried not to think any more. For a little time I became absorbed watching a family of wrens flitting in and out of the honeysuckle bush; but by degrees my thoughts went back to the shock which the intrusion of that deathimage had given me, and I pondered on the wonder of unfolded destiny.

And

If mother could have seen on even one such day as this the image my brain bears now if she could have known what the bud of Llewellyn's life was going to unfold into-and to think that God knows the whole always-all at once, one may say. And I thought, it is like this. We are like persons travelling in a train or carriage, who look out from a window upon the country as they pass, seeing just as much as can be taken in at one time by the framed space: we see things in succession. But any one who looks from a height at rest sees the whole simultaneously. what is true of place is true of time. I turned this thought over in my mind as I sat under the honeysuckles, looking towards the house without seeing, until at last I found that I was watching something take place at a window in the gable-end of the higher roof. The window had been opened since I began to look-the lattice having been fastened far back, and a figure inside the room had passed to and fro several times in front of the open space. As I began to be conscious of this, the figure came faceways to the lattice, and stood there opposite where I was sitting. The window was too far away for me to see the face distinctly. It looked small and white, I thought, and there was some kind of head-dress

that formed a setting to the face. Presently I could see that the hands of the person were busied with something, and that the arms leaned a little way over the window-sill; a small stick was fastened in the wall below the sill, and then one hand unrolled from round the stick a small white flag. A light breeze caught it quickly, and floated the flag out to its full size. It was fringed with lace, and looked like a large muslin handkerchief or veil such as any one might use to cover a baby's face in the air. I remembered to have once seen a kerchief, beautifully soft and dainty, laid away amongst mother's pretty things, and hearing mother say it had been used for her when she was

a baby. I always pictured to myself a lady's hand decked with rings like mother's spreading this handkerchief over the face of a little baby, and I used to say, "That must have been grandmother's hand." But we never heard anything about our grandmother, so there was nobody in my imagination to fit the hand. The flag from the gable window drooped or fluttered as the breeze rose or fell, all alone. The hand that fixed it in its station left it there the face vanished. After all, it was only a fichu or tippet belonging to one of the maids, I thought, hung out to dry; but at first it had seemed to me to be a vignette belonging to some little history.

Gladys came back from her walk in immense spirits. The expedition had been a great success. She had made acquaintance accidentally with, she assured me, the jolliest family, living at Rhoscolyn, half-way between Colwyn and the village she had walked to in the morning. They were rather the great people of the neighbourhood,

we found out afterwards; but all Gladys knew then was that they were coming to call upon us and meant to ask us to go and see them. "They don't like our grandfather," Gladys said. "I am sure of that by the way they spoke of him. Well, no more do I now." Just then I was listening nervously for the return of Mr Colwyn.

We waited an hour at least for dinner that evening, and, after all, had it alone. Our grandfather brought some one home with him, whom he took into his private room, and we were left to ourselves.

"My luck, you see, child," Gladys was saying to me as, the dinner having been cleared away, and fruit put on the table (the custom of having dessert was new since we came; Gladys had wrung the concession from Miss Hughes, the housekeeper), we had turned our chairs, facing each other sideways, to the open window, and were beginning to enjoy the dusky hour, too light for candles and too dark for anything but talk. "Just my luck," Gladys was saying, when the dining-room door opened. Gladys put the cherry back on her plate she was going to eat, and turned to look who was coming in. I could not have looked for the world,. though I might have guessed that the feathery sound made by that entrance could not have heralded Mr Colwyn. Tripping footsteps and a gentle rustling came out of the darkness of the doorway into the room towards where we were sitting, a chair was moved and placed between us, facing the window, and we were a party of three.

Poor little grandmother, that was the first time we saw her; it was the beginning of our knowing that we had a grandmother.

Gladys had been watching her all the time since the door opened until she sat down between us. I watched Gladys, and the expression of her face puzzled me: she was not frightened by the surprise, she looked disgusted, I thought, as she was used to look when unwelcome visitors intruded; or was it something in the appearance of the new-comer that disgusted her? When, at last, I looked for myself at our guest, I felt as if I were opening a book and reading a history which I had known all along, or I should say now it felt as if my conscious and sub-conscious selves had run up against one another and were staying together with me for a long waking moment.

The face I looked into as into an open book was small and white; the features were small, all but the eyes; the little person belonging to the face was suprisingly fragile. I did not take in the details of the dress our grandmother had on that evening, but the grotesqueness of the whole appearance left a picture in my mind that always seems to belong to her. She had a white scarf or kerchief thrown across her head, and a thick band of something black was drawn across her forehead. The effect of the head-gear was to increase the largeness of her dark eyes, the poor eyes that had an unmistakable craze in them. She turned her face from one of us to the other and back again, as if she were looking for something she could not find, and at last her eyes rested on Gladys and then she laughed. It was the sort of laugh that rings like base metal, false, for there was no mirth in it. I could see that it made Gladys shrink, but I was too much interested to mind the discordance.

"Don't you know me?" the little lady said at last, still looking at Gladys. "Antoinette, my beautiful darling," and she put out her hand and touched Gladys's hair. Gladys couldn't help it, she started away from the touch and held her head out of reach. Then the little lady laughed again and looked at me. "Proud," she said, "like my Antoinette; and quite right too, a beautiful girl has a right to be proud, she is a queen. You are not a beauty, my dear," she added as she scanned my face; "you've got nothing to be proud of. Are you the child of my Antoinette too? Are you two really sisters?" Gladys answered for me in her blunt way, saying something about my being better and cleverer than she was. But our grandmother only shook her head and laughed, and would have none of me.

After that we talked about our mother, for we had both taken in by that time who our visitor was. We told her that Gladys was not christened as our mother had been, but only by the Welsh name of Gladys. This, however, she did not believe. Her own name was Gabrielle, she said, and the beautiful granddaughter was certain to have been called after her or after the beautiful mother.

The evening grew darker as we talked, and grandmother's spirits seemed to increase with the dark

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into her talk, and suddenly she drew her chair a little forward, and leaning over close to me, said, in a loud whisper, "You wouldn't know it by just looking at them, but they are all murderers, from Mr Colwyn downwards. Every morsel of food they bring me is poisoned; fortunately I can detect it, so I baffle them, you see, for a time." There was a pause after she had said this, for we were too much puzzled to answer her. In a moment or two the moon rose above the trees and shone down upon us through the open window. I shall never forget the wistful, helpless expression on Grandmother Gabrielle's face, as she pushed her chair back again and looked up in the moonlight. Then there came a knock at the dining-room door, and grandmother started violently, and got up

and crossed the room and left us, and we heard her disputing with some one outside, and two sets of footsteps died away along the passages together.

"Madeleine, let us go up-stairs to bed-anywhere to be by ourselves," Gladys cried, and there was a tremor in her voice as she spoke. "I can't bear this sort of thing. Oh, I do hope she won't come bothering us again! Madeleine, what shall we do if she comes after us?"

I knew what was in Gladys's mind. Our sad memories were crowding upon us in this desolate place. "Let us go to bed, let us try to forget this evening. Why, this is worse than grandfather, a thousand times worse."

Gladys began to cry. I didn't feel at all inclined to cry; on the contrary, I wanted to find out more about Grandmother Gabrielle, but I fell in with Gladys's mood, and we ran up to our rooms and locked the outer door and lighted

candles. Then I made Gladys tell me of her adventures out of doors, and about her new acquaintances; and we planned where we should receive them when they called, and how we would make the drawing-room look a little less shabby, and that we should put flowers about, and coax Miss Hughes to give afternoon tea to our visitors. It was the sort of talk that felt like putting on cheerful everyday clothes after being at a funeral. We managed to get a good laugh out of it at last, and by-and-by settled for the night.

By Gladys's stillness I knew that she soon fell asleep; but the first twittering of the birds began in the July morning before I had closed my eyes. There had been no noises in the house through the short night, and I thought at first when I heard a door down below open and shut, and then the front door do the same, and then a sound of people on the stairs, that the servants were about early, perhaps it was washing-day. By that time in my life I had had many dreadful surprises, but I scarcely think any one of them had shaken me more than did the surprise of the next few moments. There was such a curious halting about the sounds I heard, and at last a noise so like that of a fall, that, not able to bear the suspense of ignorance any longer, I got up, and opening the bedroom door cautiously, for fear of disturbing Gladys, went to the head of the stairs. Our grandfather was sitting, dressed as in the morning, upon the landing, leaning back against Miss Hughes's kneeling figure. She was trying to support him, and just as I came, she, having her back to me, not seeing me, began to speak to him. I couldn't believe my senses; she called him