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"Why do you want to go there?" asked Mrs. Silcote. "To see my dear old master, Algernon Silcote: one of the finest gentlemen who ever lived. In the old times, cousin, when you were no richer than I was that man did all he could for me. He gave me all he could afford-the wages of a housemaid; but he gave me with it a delicate respect which he would not have given to the finest duchess in the land. Algernon Silcote's voice will never be heard in this world; he is a silent, long-enduring man."

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You should not have waited for him to write," said Mrs. Silcote.

"I acknowledge it," said Miss Lee. "You are right. But you brought me into this atmosphere of frivolity and neglect of duty, and so don't you see that the blame rests on your shoulders after all?"

She went at once. She was not long gone: only three days. Mrs. Silcote had spent these three days in battling with the Squire about the propriety of their going abroad. The Squire, who was in one of his unaccountable moods again, was enraged at her proposing to him the very thing he had set his heart on doing. He said that he would be somethinged if he gave way to any such feminine folly. He wanted to know if she was mad; she said she wasn't, and he said that he wasn't sure about that. She said that, as far as she had observed, he was not sure about anything. He asked did she want to insult him? She said that she would take time before she answered that. Then he asked her if she wanted to drive him mad, to which she answered that he didn't want much driving. He asked her whether Berkshire society was not good enough for her, and she said No; that she had a foolish fancy for interchanging ideas with reasonable beings. He asked her what the deuce she wanted to go abroad for; she answered, to clear his brains. He asked her was not Silcotes good enough for her, and she answered not half good enough. Then he reverted to his original proposition, that he would see them all further first, and immediately afterwards began to think whether he had not better get a new portmanteau.

Silcote and his daughter-in-law, however, had their two tongues going at one another in the very way against

which Miss Lee had warned them. They were sitting over the fire in the hall, with the stupid great dogs round them, when there came in the young footman who was James's friend, and they stopped their sparring.

Crimson plush breeches and white stockings, grey coat and brass buttons, with the Silcote crest on them, if you could see it. The figure of the lad disguised in this way, and on the face of the honest young lad, undisguisable by plush breeches or brass buttons, or any other antiquated ostentatious nonsense whatever, the great broad word "disaster" written in unmistakeable characters.

Mrs. Silcote saw it at once, and rose. The Squire, nursing his ill temper, and framing repartees for his daughterin-law which he never uttered, saw nothing of it. The footman, with disaster written on his face, only said— "You are wanted in the housekeeper's room, ma'am."

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Was it her son?" she kept saying as she followed the footman; but she knew it was not. When she got to the housekeeper's room, she found only the housekeeper, her brother, and Miss Lee.

"Why have you come home secretly like this, my dear?" she said. 66 Something has happened: I saw it in George's

face."

"Something has happened, and you must break it to Silcote. That is why I came in secretly and sent for you," said Miss Lee.

"Do you come from Algernon?"

"I do."

"Is he very ill? Is he worse?"

"Algernon is dead! Died last night. I got there too late to see him, and you must break it to God save us-James Sugden, go to her. She is going to faint, and she knows you best. Catch her."

James Sugden was ready to catch his sister if she had fallen, but there was no sign of falling about her. When Miss Lee told her dreadful news, Mrs. Silcote had put her two hands up to her head, and had turned round. The only effect was that she had loosened a great cascade of silver hair, and, with that falling over her shoulders, she turned round deadly pale.

"Dead and with that wicked lie burnt into his noble heart! To die so! And we dawdling and fretting here! Dead! This is beyond measure terrible?"

CHAPTER XLII.

UNTIL ONE PERSON AT ALL EVENTS GETS NO BENEFIT FROM THEM.

THE spring was cold, late, and wild. The north-east wind had settled down on the land, and had parched it up into a dryness more hard and more cruel than that of the longest summer-drought. The crocuses came up, but they withered; the anemones bloomed, but could not colour; the streams got low, and left the winter's mud to stagnate into zymotic diseases by the margin; the wheat got yellow; the old folks, whose time was overdue, took to dying, and the death-rate in London went up from 1,700 odd to 1,900 odd.

Death, anxious to make up his tale, in anticipation of the healthy summer which was sure to follow on this dry bitter north-easterly spring, garnered all he could. The old folks who were due to him he took as a matter of course. Threescore and ten was his watchword, and, for those who obstinately persisted in fourscore, he hung out foolish scarecrows of old friends younger than they who were dead before them; which scarecrows were in the main laughed to scorn by such of the old folks as lived in the strength of Christ and his victory.

He began to gather children with bronchitis, a sad number,-children whom, if one dare say anything on such a subject, had better have been left; then drunkards, into whose rotten lungs the north-east wind had got—men who were best dead. Then to the houses of ill-fame, where some slept and dreamt that they were picking cowslips in the old meadows, and awoke to find that they were dying utterly deserted, with only a wicked old woman to

see them die. Then to the houses of the rich, driving them with their precious ones to Bournemouth or Torquay, and following them there inexorably, till the lately blooming and busy matron became only a wild wan woman, walking up and down, and bewailing her first-born, or the rose of the family. Old Death made up his tale that month, and the Registrar General acknowledged it in the Times duly; but he need not have gone picking about here and there to make up his number. Were not the French, the Austrians, and the Italians grinning at one another with a grin which meant a noble harvest for him? Could he not have waited two months?

And of all places to descend on, for the making up of his number, St. Mary's Hospital! "The healthiest situation," said loud-mouthed Betts, "in all England." Why, yes. A very healthy situation, but old Death came there too. The death-rate had disappointed his expectations, one would think, for he was picking up victims wherever he could. And he picked up one life which Betts and Dora thought was worth all the others put together.

The buildings at St. Mary's had never properly dried, for Betts's work was all hurried-" Brummagem," if you will forgive slang; and the lake had got very much dried up, and reeked a little at night-time at the edges. St. Mary'sthe-New was not built on the healthiest site in Hampshire. If Betts had consulted a man with some knowledge of physical science, he would have learnt this. On those Bagshot Sands an isolated piece of undrained clay means scarletfever. Still, clay is good for foundations. Consequently this site for the new St. Mary's Hospital had been selected on an unhealthy and isolated piece of clay, which lay in the bosom of the healthful gravel a little above the lakes. We have no more to do with it thea what follows: a scarlet fever tragedy in a school or a training-ship is not any part of our story.

It was the Easter vacation. Arthur, the head-master, had gone away; and the rumours among the servants coincided in one point,-that he had had a fit, and that

1 Diphtheria also and other diseases of that class; at least so I have been told by a doctor who has worked among them for twenty years.

Mr. Algernon had "found him in it," and persuaded him to go abroad. Also the rumours coincided in the report that he had resigned his post; and furthermore, in the fact that Mrs. Morgan was not coming back any more.

The cloisters, the corridors, and the chapel were empty and silent. The ripple on the lake went always one way, westward, before the easterly wind, and the lake itself was low in the spring drought, and the bare shores exhaled an unhealthy smell.

There were no signs of spring to be seen about St. Mary's. Among heather and Scotch fir woods the seasons show scarcely any change at all, save twice in the year. The clay land, which will bear deciduous trees, shows changes almost innumerable. From the first beautiful purple bloom which comes over the woods when the elm is blossoming into catkins; through the vivid green of the oak of early May; through the majestic yet tender green of June; through the bright flush of the fresh Midsummer shoot; through the quiet peaceful green of summer; through the fantastic reds and yellows of autumn; on again to the calm greys of winter, sometimes silvered with frost and snow;-Nature in the heavier and more cultivable soils paints a never-ending succession of colour studies. And with the aid of changes on the surface of the soil itself; with flowers in their succession; with the bursting green of hedges; with meadows brimful of lush green grass; with grey mown fields; with the duller green of the lattermath; with corn, with clover, with a hundred other fantastic tricks, she, with atmospheric effects, makes these studies so wonderfully numerous, that they appear as inexhaustible in their variety as games at chess; otherwise, what would become of the landscape painter?

But in these "heath countries" she only flashes into gaudy colours twice: that is to say, when the bracken springs in the hollows, and where the ling blooms on the hill. At other times she keeps to the same sombre, seasonless, Australianesque colouring; sombre masses of undeciduous fir woodland, and broad stretches of brown heath.

Algernon, looking out of the window, said to Dora,—

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