“Oh, Aunt Maria, don’t, don’t be proper!” pleaded Darsie, half-laughing, half in tears. “I am a pig, and I behaved as much, and you’re a duchess and a queen, and I can’t imagine how you put up with me at all. I wonder you don’t turn me out of doors, neck and crop!”

Lady Hayes put down her knitting and rested her right hand lightly on the girl’s head, but she did not smile; her face looked very grave and sad.

“Indeed, Darsie, my dear,” she said slowly, “that is just what I am thinking of doing. Not ‘neck and crop’—that’s an exaggerated manner of speaking, but, during the last few days I have been coming to the conclusion that I made a mistake in separating you from your family. I thought too much of my own interests, and not enough of yours.” She smiled, a strained, pathetic little smile. “I think I hardly realised how young you were! One forgets. The years pass by; one falls deeper and deeper into one’s own ways, one’s own habits, and becomes unconscious of different views, different outlooks. It was a selfish act to take a young thing away from her companions on the eve of a summer holiday. I realise it now, my dear; rather late in the day, perhaps, but not too late! I will arrange that you join your family at the sea before the end of the week.”

Darsie gasped, and sat back on her heels, breathless with surprise and dismay. Yes! dismay; extraordinary though it might appear, no spark of joy or expectation lightened the shocked confusion of her mind. We can never succeed in turning back the wheels of time so as to take up a position as it would have been if the disturbing element had not occurred. The holiday visit to the seaside would have been joy untold if Aunt Maria had never appeared and given her unwelcome invitation, but now!—now a return to Seaview would be in the character of a truant carrying within her heart the consciousness of failure and defeat. In the moment’s silence which followed Aunt Maria’s startling announcement the words of advice and exhortation spoken by her father passed one by one through Darsie’s brain.

“If you cannot have what you like, try to like what you have... Put yourself now and then in your aunt’s place.—A sacrifice grudgingly performed is no sacrifice at all... What is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.”

Each word condemned her afresh; she stood as judge before the tribunal of her own conscience, and the verdict was in every case the same. Guilty! She had not tried; she had not imagined; everything that she had done had been done with a grudge; the effort, the forbearance, the 

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