vate life keep up a handsome

not like seeing people cat. But Mrs. Tudor, in spite of this little peculiarity, and several others of a like nature, was not a mean woman. She was too intensely selfish, too avid of the good opinion of others, to be essentially mean. In what she could be stingy, unseen, she was stingy; in liberality that showed she was liberal, liberal, occasionally, to excess.

'I have too much feeling for my own happiness,' Mrs. Tudor would say, when a handsome parson or fashionable physician pleaded some case of misery to her. 'I have always been led away by my heart -too much for my own good, perhaps.' And then, notwithstanding her threescore years and ten, the recollection of so much self-sacrifice and vicarious suffering would make Mrs. Tudor weep-veritable tears, but promptly dried-with the delicacy of a woman who, though she feels, does not mean to parade that feeling to the world; and who remembers whereof the bloom of her cheeks is made!

She never subscribed to public charities even with the seductions of standing in print among lords and marchionesses. The widow's mite should be given in secret' was one of Mrs. Tudor's axioms. Let the great and rich give away in high places. Enough for me to cast my poor offering into the treasury unseen;' with only the handsome parson or fashionable doctor to act as recording angel.

What will you have? Twenty pounds a year among printed donations of twice, thrice, four times that amount go for nothing in the charitable city where Mrs. Tudor lived. But twenty pounds a year divided into widows' mites in pri

giving. Mrs. Tudor knew her generation, and was wise with its wisdom. Every one said Mrs. Tudor was a charming old woman: I think every one, except her family and dependents, really liked her. When she stabbed your absent friends she did it with a delicacy that belongs only to long and refined experience. The coarse blow of a common assassin for ever reminds you that if you, too, have a purse, and take your eye from him, you shall fall. Mrs. Tudor always performed her cruel office out of the depth of her regard for her immediate listener. With your dear girls visiting at her house, should I do right to conceal it from you?' 'As the pastor and guardian of your flock, ought you not to be told?' 'With your back garden close upon their area, should I-should I be a friend if I remained silent?' And all the slaughtered characters forthwith rose up in the light of necessary victims offered up by Mrs. Tudor at the altar of Spartan principle and friendship.

Her flattery was as good as her scandal. The same delicate flavour of well-bred discrimination made it palatable, even in inordinately large doses. To tell a woman of forty that she is young and charming would be simply gross; but to say,

My dear friend, I have something I really grieve to talk to you about: I don't know how you will take it, but as an old woman who had done with life before you began it, I feel that I must speak. All the world is talking of that poor fellow's evident infatuation for you. He is but a boy-spare him! tell his mother to send him to London-anything. You are not offended, now, are you? No; I knew you could not be!'

To say this is to possess a charming, refined nature, even when saying disagreeable things. This was Mrs. Tudor's style of flattery.

She called herself old; and she was very old, even for the city of sempiternelles where she lived; but she held old age at bay more stoutly, I really believe, than any other woman of her age extant. She was a model of good making-up. I can never see the justice of condemning, wholesale, all women who paint. Condemn them utterly if they paint badly; but give homage due to all successful works of real art. Mrs. Tudor was extraordinarily well done. Her hair was a dark irongrey, not any of those blacks and chesnuts that every shifting light can convert into prisms of red, green, and purple; her eyebrows were marked by one dark yet perfectly delicate line; her cheeks bore the faintest roseate tinge that the genius of Paris (assisted by after processes of her own) could supply; her teeth, her figure, were all triumphs of imitative art. The most difficult part of the picture, and one in which so many inferior artists fail, the old, wrinkled, sapless hands were never shown without gloves. I repeat it, Mrs. Tudor was well done; and whether she, or Wilson, or the mere artificers from whence her charms came in gross, possessed the greater genius, I hold that the result of so much thought, and choice, and patient, unfaltering every-day labour, was a thing to be respected.

But cultivation is required for all high taste in art. When Esther Fleming first found herself again in Mrs. Tudor's presence, the vision of a painted and galvanized corpse tottering forward to meet her with deathly sprightliness came upon her with even more awful clearness than it had used to do when she

was a child. All the painful processes by which Mrs. Tudor's rejuvenescence had been won-the dentistry, the dyeing, the daily paddings and powderings and paintings for well-nigh half a century, were mysteries too occult for Esther's mind to unravel, or even marvel over. She liked her Aunt Engleheart's face, white and still as death it

self: all passion and unrest quenched out of it by long years of poverty and Miss Joan. She liked to see that old face, with the venerable white hair and little close-frilled cap, as the evening light fell on it through the branches of the thorn-tree by the porch; to see the folded withered hands lying peacefully at rest; the whole little, worn, bent form just as though waiting, patient and quiescent, for death to come. This was the poetry of extreme, helpless old age; and Esther often at such times had spoken under her breath, half in awe of the frail, still life so barely withheld from the final stillness of death itself. But Mrs. Tudor! Mrs. Tudor, sprightly and roseate and alert! All the girl's old childish horror of something coming off' rushed across her mind as she remembered she would have to kiss Mrs. Tudor's cheek; and every one of the little affectionate speeches she had been preparing on her journey forsook her memory.

Aunt Thalia's warmth of heart was equal, however, to all occasions -even domestic ones. Esther, my dear, dear child!' and then, much to Esther's relief, the greatest difficulty of meeting was got over by Mrs. Tudor herself depositing a very long but circumspect kiss upon her cheek. So grown I should scarce have recognized you! Wilson, has not Miss Fleming grown? Two shillings for bringing you from the railway? Certainly not. Esther, love, I insist upon your not paying more than eighteen-pence; and let him carry up Miss Fleming's luggage to her apartment before he's paid. Wilson, the small_upper room that faces the sea. I knew my dear niece would not mind mounting a little high,' she whispered to Esther, as Wilson, very rustling and dignified, marched out of the room. 'Yon princess in black silk would have been sour to me for a month if I had dared dispossess her of hers; and my dear Esther's little feet are too young to know whether they run up one or two flights of stairs at a time.'

Mrs. Tudor embraced her again, but without more kisses: these risks were only incurred under the

indispensable press of affection at coming and going: and then Esther remarked that she did not care at all where she slept, and would be very sorry indeed to put Wilson out in any way.

'And how is my dear sister? Sit down, my love, and unloose your bonnet-strings. How is my dear sister Cecilia? You wouldn't have

a glass of wine, Esther, after your journey, now-would you?'

Oh, no! Aunt Thalia. I never take wine.'

You

'Dear child! so natural! are very little altered, love, except in height. I take an early dinner, you must know, Esther; my doctor here desires it, and so I obey, but it breaks in upon my habits sadly; then about seven I drink tea. Now what will you have?' Mrs. Tudor looked extraordinarily genial and hospitable. What will you have? They can get you a chop in a minute.' And she stretched her hand out, figuratively, towards the bell.

'I would much rather have nothing but tea,' said Esther. 'I am not hungry-I mean not very—I had my dinner on the road.'

'Now, do you mean it, my love? do you positively mean it? I will never forgive you if you don't make yourself perfectly at home while you are with me. Well, then, we will have tea at once. And, Wilson,' to that potentate, who had now re-entered the room, bid Mrs. Sims send up the cold duck, if you please; it will be just the thing for my niece after her long journey. Wilson will take you to your room, Esther. I would go myself, only that my good doctor tells me I must refrain as much as possible from walking upstairs.'

And then Mrs. Wilson, condescendingly bland, but still with the kind of manner which she, as a servant, naturally felt to Esther as a poor relation, conducted her to her room on the third floor-a threecornered apartment with a sloping roof, a bed the size of a coffin, and a window from whence you had a very nice side-view of the sea if you sat upon the floor.

'You find your aunt a good deal

changed, no doubt, Miss Fleming?" remarked the lady's-maid, fidgeting about the strings of one of Esther's cases, but obviously only giving herself a pretext to stop and talk.

Even I, that am with her constant, can see it only too plain. She's pitched away extraordinary the last three months, miss.'

Esther could see no particular change, she answered. She thought, perhaps, that her Aunt Thalia's was not a face to show illness much.

'Perhaps so,' said Wilson, drily. Appearances are deceitful; but then you must remember I see missus at all times, Miss Fleming. Thinner! Why, bless you, she's gone away to half what she were before her last attack. I've took in all her dresses without her knowing it; and she thinks, sometimes, she's getting stout again, and tells the doctors so; but I know better. I wish some of them, or some one belonging to her, would tell her a little truth about her health, Miss Fleming, and then, perhaps, she wouldn't kill herself-dressing and racketing and sitting up late at night as she do-kill herself, and I may truly say, kill all those who have to wait upon her too!'

Mrs. Wilson pressed her hand with much feeling upon the region of her left lung, and laid her head on one side with a sigh. It was evident that to her own mind her twenty-five pounds a year were no equivalent whatever to the disadvantages of being in Mrs. Tudor's intimate employ and favour.

'What sort of illness has she had?' she proceeded, when Esther had inquired into the nature of her mistress's last attack; 'why, you don't mean to say your aunt never wrote you word that she'd had a stroke?'

A stroke!' interrupted Esther, looking grave and shocked. 'Oh, Wilson! you surely can't mean-?'

'Yes, I do, miss. I mean a stroke of paralysis. I lived with the old Countess of Davenport up to her death, and I knew directly I saw your aunt's face she was going to be taken like her ladyship. She was a mistress, if you like, Miss Fleming. Thirty-six pounds a year

and the best of perquisites, and a under maid kept on purpose to set up and unlace the dresses at night; because her ladyship said from the first, "Mrs. Wilson," her ladyship say to me, "I see that your 'ealth's delicate, and

'And Aunt Thalia, Wilson ? Please tell me about Aunt Thalia's illness.'

'Well, Miss Fleming, it was after an At Home at our own house; and missus and me was putting away some of the ornaments, when she cried out, suddent, "Wilson!" and tottered back a step or two, and fell on the sofa-so!' And Mrs. Wilson went through a little impromptu rehearsal, with great gusto, upon the coffin bed. I knew what it was in a minute, miss-the thick way of speaking, and dull eyes, and stiff hands, and all the rest of itand I got her undressed; and Miss Whitty, the-the person who lodges underneath us, you know-sent for the doctor. And he knew what it was, Miss Fleming, just as well as I did; and Mrs. Tudor, she knew what it was, too; but we made light of the whole matter; and none of us ever called the attack by its right name, and we don't now. When missus speaks about it, she says, "That time I was a little faint and giddy, you know, Wilson." And I say the same; and so must you, of course, if your aunt should happen to mention it.'

And Aunt Thalia goes out to parties as much as ever?' cried Esther. How can she care about them after such a fearful warning?'

"Ah!' ejaculated Mrs. Wilson, piously, and suddenly remembering the pain above her heart. Ah! there's no saying what those that belongs to this world wouldn't do to escape out of themselves and their own tempers and fancies! I agreed to accept your aunt's situation on the highest of recommendations, Miss Fleming. The Dean of Sarum's lady (who has known me since I was that high, and all my family, too) begged me herself to take it; and though I had never lived out of the first of establishments before, I was willing to do so because of all your aunt said about my having my

time to myself. Time! why, I'd sooner live with the Countess of Davenport again on half the wages, and wait on the three young ladies besides, than be where I am, Miss Fleming. Morning, noon, and night, I haven't a moment to myself: your aunt wants a nurse, miss, as well as a maid. And though I'd do as much as my strength allowed for a fellow-creature '-Mrs. Wilson assumed the air of a trampled but forgiving martyr'a fellow-creature in real illness, I don't consider myself called upon to set up o' nights for people that are out at routs and card-parties, and then to have to make their sick-messes, and carry their air-cushion, and put up with their humours by day! Not without extra wages, Miss Fleming! I read my Bible, and I hope I perform my 'umble duties as a Christian, but I know what service is.'

And this is the woman we have been told is such a treasure,' thought Esther, when Mrs. Wilson, after this little exposition of her opinions respecting her own worth, had left her alone. Her great, lonely, fine-furnished rooms, and this woman, with her heartlessness and discontent, are the nearest approach to a home that Aunt Thalia has. I am glad to think Mrs. Engleheart will die poor and quiet and unpretending at Countisbury, and have Joan, with all her faults, to wait upon her to the last.'

She felt her heart almost warm towards Mrs. Tudor when she joined her again down stairs. There was something within her that instinctively recognized and respected the courage of this old woman of the world in neither shrinking from, nor secking sympathy under, the dark shadow that had fallen upon her. If it was courage wrongly shown (cards, rouge, parties, instead of calm meditation and solemn retrospect), it was courage still; the same stout nerve that had upheld Joan Engleheart during so many years of unpitied, unassisted poverty; the same strong, enduring power that, simple and youthful though she was, lay dormant in Esther's Own breast. Yes, she looked at the old bland face that