The London season was at its height. The weather was warm and sultry, the days were at their longest. The shops were gay with beautiful dresses, richly trimmed bonnets, gloves, parasols, hats-the thousand and one pretty articles of usefulness and beauty which are considered indispensable by the people who drive about in carriages and live in the large houses in the West End of London.

The village choir were practicing in the church-their voices, somewhat harsh and uncultivated, were sending forth volumes of sound into the summer air. The church doors were thrown open, and a young man dressed in cricketing-flannels was leaning against the porch. He was tall, and square-shouldered, with closely-cropped dark hair, and a keen, intelligent face.

Eileen, Marjorie, and Letitia Chetwynd were expected home from school. It was a bright day early in April, and Mrs. Chetwynd was seated in her luxurious London drawing-room conversing with her special friend, Mrs. Acheson. Two years ago Mrs. Chetwynd, on the death of her husband, a distinguished Indian officer, had returned to England. She was a fashionable, up-to-date-looking lady now. Her widow's dress was carefully chosen-not too depressing, but all that was correct and proper.

The boys were most troublesome. They never would mind in the very least when father had one of his worst headaches. It was not that they did not try to be good-I will say that Alex had the kindest heart, and that Charley was good-natured too-but it seemed to me as though they could not walk quietly; they would stump upstairs, and they would go heavily across the big attic where they slept, and father was so fearfully sensitive; the least sound made him start up, and then he would get into a sort of frenzy and hardly know what he was doing. He would call out to the boys and thunder to them to...

The room had three occupants, two were men, the third a woman. The men were middle-aged and gray-haired, the woman on the contrary was in the prime of youth; she was finely made, and well proportioned. Her face was perhaps rather too pale, but the eyes and brow were noble, and the sensitive mouth showed indications of heart as well as intellect.

"Nora, Nora Where are you?" called a clear, girlish voice, and Cara Burt dashed headlong into a pretty bedroom all draped in white, where a tall girl was standing by an open window. "Nora " she cried, "what are you doing up in your room at this hour, when we are all busy in the garden preparing our tableaux? Mrs Hazlitt says that she herself will recite 'A Dream of Fair Women, ' and by unanimous consent you are to be Helen of Troy. Did any one ever suit the part so well? 'Divinely tall, and most divinely fair.'

It was on a summer's evening early in the month of August that the little Mummy was once again seen on the platform at Dawlish. She looked now very much like she did when we saw her of yore-slightly broadened, it is true, by the added years, but she still wore somewhat rusty widow's black, and her face still had that half-anxious, half-comical expression, which made people turn to look at her with something between a smile and a sigh. She was commonplace and plain, and yet in one sense she was neither commonplace nor plain. She had a character, and that character had developed during the last...

The house was long and low and rambling. In parts at least it must have been quite a hundred years old, and even the modern portion was not built according to the ideas of the present day, for in 1870 people were not so aesthetic as they are now, and the lines of beauty and grace were not considered all essential to happiness. So even the new part of the house had square rooms destitute of ornament, and the papers were small in pattern and without any artistic designs, and the windows were square and straight, and the ceilings were somewhat low.

Priscilla Weir, Mabel Lushington, and Annie Brooke were all seated huddled up close together on the same low window-sill. The day was a glorious one in the beginning of July. The window behind the girls was open, and the softest of summer breezes came in and touched their young heads, playing with the tumbled locks of hair of different shades, varying from copper-colour to dark, and then to brightest gold.

Haddo Court had been a great school for girls for many generations. In fact, for considerably over a century the Court had descended from mother to daughter, who invariably, whatever her husband's name, took the name of Haddo when she became mistress of the school. The reigning mistress might sometimes be unmarried, sometimes the reverse; but she was always, in the true sense of the word, a noble, upright, generous sort of woman, and one slightly in advance of her generation.