world is in summer-time, when everything is green and a dear mother loves you."

"It will be your heaven, too, Margey, dear," Mrs. Vincent said. "I don't like you to talk so--"

"Then I won't," Margaret answered, impulsively. "I won't do anything you don't like. Here is father."

"He has come to tell us something," Mrs. Vincent said. She started from her chair and looked at him, and then for a moment at the green world beyond the porch, as if she felt that it would give her strength. But his news was not what she had expected.

"I'm going to London on Monday morning," he said, "and should like to take Margaret with me. Can she go?"

"How long is it to be for?" Mrs. Vincent asked, while Margaret stood breathless, seeing in imagination a panorama of great cities pass before her eyes.

"Only for a day and a night."

"A night, too?" Margaret exclaimed; for on the occasional visits her father had paid to London he had gone and returned on the same day. "It sounds wonderful."

He thought out his words before speaking, as if in his own mind he saw the outcome of things that were going to happen. "All the same," he said, "you will probably be glad to come back."

"Yes, father, yes," she exclaimed, joyfully; "but then I shall know, I shall have seen and remember it all. Dear mother!" and she turned to her again, hungry for her sympathy.

Mrs. Vincent always understood, and she put her arm round Margaret, while she asked her husband, "Where will you stay if you don't come back till the next day, and will Margaret's things be good enough?"

"We shall stay--oh, at the Langham, I suppose. Of course they will be good enough."

He went back to his papers and took up the two letters again. The one from his brother was merely a reiteration of what he had said before. The important part in it was that which concerned his health. Lately there had been disturbing threats; it was possible that symptoms might develop which would hurry the inevitable. It was to take a specialist's opinion, so far as might be gathered from a letter, to see his lawyers, and to arrange for a probable voyage in the near future that Mr. Vincent was going to London. But it was the other letter that he lingered over, the one written on gray paper with violet ink. 

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