with her, I suppose," Jane said, with a transparent effort at indifference.

"Oh, yes, he has been and is in what men of his calibre call love. She interests, amuses and excites him. She always makes up especially well when he is likely either to see or to hear about her. Men like to hear the woman they're spoken about with admired, you know, and she never asks him to own up about anything that they say of him when he's away from her. She has the art of holding him on, in fact, and she has held him on for five years."

For no reason that she could assign to herself, Jane felt inexpressibly offended. She had no right and no reason to think that Captain Stafford was made of fine porcelain, and Mrs. Collette of effective pottery merely; nevertheless, the notion that there was this distinction between them socially had got into her head. In her secret heart she felt there would be less incongruity in a marriage between her father and Mrs. Collette than in one between Mrs. Collette and Captain Stafford.

"After all, why should papa not marry to please himself?" she said aloud, following out her own train of thought.

Florence stamped her foot, and caught one corner of her pretty lip in with a pearly tooth. In the old Bath days, when Jane had annoyed her to this extent, she had been wont to show her displeasure by slapping Jane's face. But she curbed her inclination to do so on this occasion by a timely recollection of a certain favour she would require at Jane's hands in the course of a few days.

"There is this reason why papa should not marry, either to please himself or to please Mrs. Collette. He might have a second family, and as he would be in his dotage by the time their mother could make them interesting to him, he would probably be wheedled into leaving some, if not most, of his money away from us to them. No; he must be stopped from the commission of such a folly. I will undertake to either force or persuade Mrs. Collette to give him up."

Though at the first blush of the matter Jane had been to the full as averse to the prospect of having Helen Collette for a stepmother as Florence was now showing herself to be, she (Jane) revolted now at the arbitrary and domineering way in which her sister spoke. Lord Roydmore had always petted, indulged and

gratified Florence to the utmost of his power, but no thought of his happiness or comfort swayed her now, when she was resolving upon a course that she knew would be contrary to his will. It was not of his honour or happiness that she was thinking. It was solely of that money which he would have to leave, and which she was already greedily grasping in imagination.

"Interference will come very badly from you, Florence. After all, you are not nearly as much concerned as I am, and if I raise no objection to Mrs. Collette, you're bound to accept her civilly." Florence laughed.

"My dear child," she said, "you make a very praiseworthy effort to assert yourself against me, but you can't do it, Jane, you can't do it. The habit of my authority over you is strong upon you still. You always were very fond of me, you know, dear, and you will be guided by me now. Let me alone! it will be better for you in the end."

She spoke very suavely and sweetly, and put her hand caressingly and gently on Jane's as she spoke. The latter was puzzled, partially subjugated, but not convinced.

"When you are loving to me, I would do anything in the world for you, Flo; at least almost anything."

"That's right, dear; that's how it ought to be between sisters. I know you again now. You're my own affectionate goose of a Jane. I didn't know the aggressive young woman who defied me just now."

It occurred to Jane that the sooner she left off being an affectionate goose the better it would be for her. But as she had no desire to upset the present harmonious relations between herself and Florence, she kept this reflection to herself.

To Geoffrey Graves's surprise, his wife was at her very best this night in the little family-deferentially attentive and loving to her father, prettily submissive and affectionate to himself, and apparently devoted in a tenderly protecting way to Jane. When they had all reassembled in the drawing-room (though her soul was caten out with the weariness of this family party), she placed herself on a stool at her father's feet in the old girlish way, and proceeded to cajole him by what even Geoffrey, who knew her pretty well by this time, took for a display of real filial tenderness and jealous desire to keep as much of his love to herself as possible.

"Dear papa!" she murmured, "it is so good to be back with you again. It is so good to know that you don't care a bit for any one else in the world, excepting Jack and Jane and me, in spite of what horrid people say."

Lord Roydmore fidgeted under this monopolising and enthralling address, and replied to it rather hesitatingly :

"My dear Florence, a man can't expect to absorb his children's hearts any more than he can their time. You, for instance have closer and dearer claims upon you than I can make. Jane and Jack may follow your example any day. I am not a selfish father. I do not desire that you should waste your young lives entirely upon your poor old father."

Florence put her lips to his hand, and held that member tight as she said:

"If people could see how happy we are together, they wouldn't say such horrid things to me as they have been saying lately."

Lord Roydmore was slightly troubled with a cough. When the cough had passed, he said:

"People are apt to say horrid things about all of us. I think we should all do well to avoid listening to rumours, especially when they are slanderous."

He was thinking of the rumours that were current respecting Florence herself at the moment. But that adroit young swordswoman took his weapon and turned it against himself.

"I haven't been able to avoid hearing, but I have declined to believe the slanderous rumours, papa. They were not nice, not at all nice; at the same time, they were too ridiculous. Fancy people getting up the report that you were thinking of marrying, actually marrying, Mrs. Collette, Captain Stafford's Mrs. Collette

"Florence! you are more than deceitful; you never heard the rumour till I told you of it myself this afternoon, told you of it as a fact," Jane struck in tempestuously; "you are insulting and cruel

She paused, panic-stricken, in the midst of her reproachful torrent of words. Lord Roydmore had snatched his hand from his favourite child, and was lying back, looking faint and white, against his cushioned chair. The words, "Captain Stafford's Mrs. Collette," had stuck a knife into his heart, and that heart was pitiably weak.

CHAPTER IX.

"SEND FOR JACK."

SINCE the day when the parable of the carnations had been spoken to him, Captain Stafford had seen nothing of Helen Collette. She was another man's property now, and he would not share the delights of private unfettered intercourse with her with any man.

The report of the engagement between the beautiful widow and "old Roydmore," spread rapidly through certain circles, but not in that in which the Wyndhams revolved. Down in their beautiful home at Redhill, the old bachelor brother and maiden sister were out of reach of the echoes even of the gossip which spread like flames on a dry prairie in the circles within circles of fashionable and smart society. As usual, they went up to town to see her two or three times a week, and as usual her nice frank, womanly letters were found reposing with equal frequency on Mr. Wyndham's breakfast-table.

Time after time, as these letters, breathing a touching and beautiful spirit of grateful affection and reliance on him, were opened and read by Mr. Wyndham, did the good, generoushearted, humble-minded old man resolve to put his fate to the touch, and relieve the dear, financially-harassed woman, to whom he was so devotedly and honourably attached, from her monetary difficulties. Being guileless as a child, he had long ago taken his sister into his confidence concerning the hopes, fears, wishes, aspirations and doubts which he entertained about Helen Collette. Unlike the majority of only sisters of an only brother, the joyous-natured old maiden lady thought Helen "good enough for even brother Ralph." She endowed Mrs. Collette, in fact, with an extraordinary number of excellent qualities of which that lady did not even know as much as their names.

"Helen has such a fund of delicate pride," she would say affectionately, when he would read her a passage from one of Mrs. Collette's letters, in which that lady would pathetically entreat him not to over-burden her soul with gratitude by sending her any more cheques, which, in spite of her dire need, she could not bring herself to accept.

"Helen has such a fund of delicate pride, Ralph. I see things as quickly as most people, and I know that in her case there is no feigned reluctance to accept the kindnesses you show her. No, no; everything about our dear Helen is real, thank God, and the sooner she is our Helen in very truth the better I shall be pleased."

To these remarks of his sister, made in the best of all good faith, Mr. Wyndham would reply like the true-hearted gentle

man:

"I will never trade on her gratitude, Dorothy. Our Helen has a noble nature, which might lead her to reward me too generously for the little I have been able to do for her. I must protect her against her own grateful impulses. I must never dare to ask her to crown my life with joy and glory by becoming my wife, while there is a chance of a better man than myself winning her."

"But there is no 'better man' than yourself in the case, Ralph. Helen, though she mixes freely with the gay world, is untouched, I am sure, by the fulsome flatteries which those men of the world who do not understand her innate worth pour forth upon her. My dear brother, I would never counsel you to seek mere beauty and grace in the woman you would make your wife. Helen has these gifts which appeal to those who see what is on the surface only, but she has other and higher gifts."

"A perfect woman, nobly planned,'" Mr. Wyndham quoted; with tears in his light grey protruding eyes. "Dorothy, I have always tried to live a life upon which I shall not be ashamed to look back when my time comes. But if God gives me this good gift, if I am ever blessed enough to be the one to whom Helen will entrust the charge of her most pure and precious life, no one will feel how unworthy I am of such honour more keenly, than I shall myself."

"You think too lowly of yourself, but you can't think too highly of Helen," old Dorothy Wyndham said, blinking away tears for which she could assign no cause for shedding, even to herself. "Helen is heart-free, Ralph, and I know that the sentiment of gratitude which she entertains towards you, for what she herself calls your 'unceasing, unresting' kindness, is stronger than the 'love' most women give the men they marry. My dear brother, you are too modest! Why shouldn't a woman