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For himself, he came in time to be so absorbed in other interests, those of a political life, as not in the least to miss the affection he had so deliberately stifled in its birth. In a rather narrow way a clever, though never a brilliant man; accurate, painstaking and calm, he gradually became very useful to his party. And thus, contentedly enough, he lived his life, rather congratulating himself than otherwise, on what he had made of it, and on the strength of character which had so thoroughly thrown off and outgrown the bitter disappointment of his early manhood.

The childhood and youth of Marion and her brother had not, however, been on the whole desolate or unhappy. Indeed, it takes a great deal, thank God, to crush the happiness out of healthy children I And they don’t miss what they have never known.

The first great sorrow was Harry’s going to school; but at the Name period, a kindly disposed and very terrible governess appearing on the scene, Marion’s life was by no means solitary and loveless as she had anticipated. The happiest times they remembered, poor children, were the summer months, Harry’s holidays, which with this kind Miss Jervis, they every year spent in Brentshire, their father’s native county, and where he still owned, near the little village of Bradley, a pretty cottage and a few acres of land—the remains of a once considerable property. In Brentshire, too, at the dull little town of Mallingford, lived the old Aunt Tremlett, Harry’s godmother, from whom they learned the few particulars they ever knew of their pretty young mother and her early death.