People who know the city of London, and like to wander up and down the streets, soon learn to leave the broad and more modern thoroughfares and to plunge into the silence and seclusion of the queer by-ways which lie away from the great roaring sea of traffic, like the caves and shallows that skirt some great ocean bay.

Amongst these retired spots none are more suggestive than the old churchyards all blurred and dim with London smoke, but yet in which a few trees yearly put forth green leaves of little promise, and a choir of sooty sparrows chirp around the queer old steeples or perch impudently upon the leaden ornaments which adorn the sacred porch. In these places which even in summer are well-like in their cool impenetrable shade there is no little business going on, however, for all round the rusty iron railing which incloses the weed-entangled graveyard the houses of city merchants seem to crowd and hustle for space; and, if they had any time for it, the clerks behind those dust-blinded windows might spend an hour not unprofitably in looking down upon the decaying monuments of departed citizens and meditating at once on the uncertainty of human affairs and the benefits of life assurance.

Amongst the dozen or so of such places illustrating the brick-and-mortar history of the city none are more suggestive than the church and yard of St. Simon Swynherde, which, lying in the circumbendibus of a lane named after the same saint, forms, as it were, a sort of outlying island, upon whose quiet shores the incautious wayfarer, being sometimes lost or cast away, can hear the humming surges of the great sea as they boom in the thoroughfares beyond. There is no alteration in this place from year to year, except such differences as are brought about by the change of seasons; no civic improvement troubles its sedate gloom no adventurous speculator regards it as a promising site for building blocks of offices no railway company casts an evil eye upon its seclusion within the area formed by the church and the tall dim houses which have mouldered into uniform neutrality of colour.

Even the march of time seems to have been arrested amidst the decay of the place, since the bell of the church clock rusted from its bearings and the index of the old sun-dial fell a prey to accumulated canker. The spring brings a few green buds and feeble leaves upon the grimy trees; the summer serves to accumulate the store of dust and torn paper and shreds of light rubbish which the autumn wind swirls into neglected corners on the dim evenings when the rain weeps on the blackened windows and the mist creeps up to the steeple in long ghostly shapes. The winter brings a frozen cyclone which whistles round and round or gently covers the graveyard with snow, the unbroken whiteness of which is gradually spotted and interlaced with sooty flakes, as though the genius of the place resented the intrusion and would make no further compromise than half mourning.

The dimmest, darkest, and dirtiest of all the houses round the yard was that of Richard Dryce & Co., factors and general merchants. It was never known who was the Co., for Richard Dryce managed his own business, and lived in the house, in one of the back rooms of which overlooking a square paved courtyard he had been born. The business belonged to his father before him, and he himself had married into the business of another factor and general merchant. His wife had died some twenty years before the period of this story died in giving birth to a boy, who was sometimes mistaken for the Co., but who at present occupied no better position than that of a superior clerk, with the questionable advantage of living with his father in the dull old house, where he had to go through the warehouse amidst innumerable bales and crates and packages to reach the staircase that conducted him to the gloomy rooms, the old-fashioned furniture of which suited his father, but was sorely against his own taste.

How he should have come to have any opinion of his own is perhaps a mystery, for he resembled his mother, who was a simple creature, easily influenced, and with all her tastes apparently moulded on the pattern set before her by her husband. Still, however it may have been, though he was born in the gloomy house, and was subject to the same influences, the younger Dryce whose name was Robert never took kindly to the dull routine to which his father’s habits doomed him. He was too dutiful and too mild in disposition in fact, too unlike his own father to offer any direct opposition to it, or to complain very often of its exactions; but he felt that at twenty he was kept with too tight a hand, and that there were worlds beyond Saint Simon Swynherde, which might be harmlessly explored.

Richard Dryce was, however, not a bad man, not a cruel or a hard man in his inmost heart; but he had been himself devoted from early life to one condition of things, which were in some strange way in accordance with his natural constitution, or with which he had become identified till they grew into a necessary part of his existence. He was a self-contained man an undemonstrative man, whose mind was attuned to respectable solitude, and who, without being a misanthrope, regarded his fellow creatures through a ground-glass medium, which made them seem shadowy and unapproachable. A few business acquaintances he had, with whom he would sometimes take his chop and glass of old port at a city tavern of an evening; he would even, on rare occasions, go the length of smoking a cigar in company with one or two of his less distant companions; but his laugh was like the harsh echo of a disused violin, and he seldom or never invited anybody to see him at home.

One of the people whom he disliked most said that he was “a buttoned-up man,” and Richard Dryce could never forgive him the description was so true.

One of his most intimate friends, an alderman, of congenial temperament, who had greatly distinguished himself by quarrelling and exchanging vituperative epithets with another alderman on the magisterial bench, seriously advised him to become a candidate for civic honours; but he strenuously refused, although he ultimately permitted his son Robert to achieve something like independence by becoming a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Twidlers, whose hall stood within the precincts of Saint Simon Swynherde. It was only on the occasion of one of their dinners that Robert was allowed to be out after ten o’clock; but that restriction did not prevent his spending the larger number of his evenings between eight o’clock and ten at the Twidlers’ Hall, which mouldy old structure, with its great, cold, lonely dining-room and awkward polygonal ante-rooms decorated with portraits of deceased dignitaries, held an attraction not to be found elsewhere, in the person of pretty Agnes Raincliffe, the only daughter of the company’s beadle.

For six months they had been under the sweet illusion that disinterested affection must eventually win for itself a way to union; but old Mr. Raincliffe had spoken seriously to them, and altogether forbade their further meeting until Robert had spoken to his father. He went home that very night, and, nerved to a sort of desperation, did speak to his father, ending with the usual declarations that his choice was unalterable. Perhaps it was; but, whether or not, Richard Dryce went the very way to make it so when he laughed that discordant laugh, and, with a taunt against his son’s weakness of purpose and his dependent position, told him to dismiss such a scheming little hussey from his thoughts, for he was to marry when he had permission, which would never be granted to such a match as the beadle wanted to bring about.

Robert left his father’s presence without a word; but in a week from that date he had followed Agnes down into the country, whither she had been sent out of the way. When he returned he wrote a letter to his father, to say that they were married. It is easy to guess what followed. When he called for an answer to his communication, he received a brief note, saying that he was discarded from that hour, need never trouble himself to enter the doors of the old house again, and that henceforth he must look to his own exertions for the means of living. This letter was sent by the hand of a sort of managing clerk, one Jaggers, who was at the same time commissioned to tell Robert that he could, if he chose, obtain a situation in a house at Liverpool, where his father’s interest was sufficient to secure him a clerkship at a very moderate salary. Now it so happened that Jaggers had always appeared to be the best friend young Robert ever had; he had sympathized with him on the subject of his father’s harshness; had applauded his noble sentiments when he had imparted the secret of his engagement to Agnes; had wished that he was master of the establishment in St. Simon’s Yard, that justice might be done to disinterested virtue, and had generally assumed the part of guide, philosopher, and friend, tempered by humble deference, to the young man. It was arranged between them, therefore, that, after a time, during which Robert should accept the situation at Liverpool, a more successful appeal might be made to Dryce senior, and that a letter addressed to him should be sent under cover to Jaggers, who would lay it on his table.

Robert and his young wife went away, leaving this good-natured fellow to watch their interests. A year passed, and the letter had been written, but remained unanswered; indeed, according to Jaggers’s showing, Richard Dryce was more inveterate than ever, and was unapproachable on the subject of his undutiful son, in pleading whose cause he, Jaggers, had very nearly obtained his own dismissal. The firm in which Robert was a clerk became bankrupt in the commercial crisis, and he was thrown out of employment. Again he wrote to his father, saying that he had an appointment offered him in Australia, and only wanted the money to pay his passage. He received no reply, but some people who knew him in Liverpool made up the sum, and his wife came to London to live with her father (who was now superannuated in favour of a new beadle), and to wait for his return, or for the remittance that was to come by the first mail, that she might join him there.

Their first child, a girl, had been a poor sickly little creature, and was dead; but Agnes was likely again to become a mother, and waited anxiously for the money which would enable her to prepare for such an event. Anxiously as she waited, it never came, and Jaggers, to whom it was to have been directed, advanced her a sovereign, as he said, “out of his small means,” and then lost sight of her, for she and her father had moved into other lodgings, where the managing clerk could scarcely trouble himself to go, unless he had good news to take with him. Indeed, he had so much to occupy his attention, that some months had elapsed since he had seen Agnes; once only he had written a short reply to a note imploring him to say whether any remittance had arrived; but how could he spare time to attend to such matters when Mr. Dryce was every week taking a less active part in the business, and the Christmas quarter was stealing on with the balance-sheet not even thought of in the press of country orders. Mr. Richard Dryce was still hale and active; but those who knew him best, thought that he was breaking. His voice was less harsh, his hair had turned from iron-gray to white, and in his face there was an anxious look as of one who waits for something that does not come. Once or twice old acquaintances ventured to ask after his son, but he shook his head, and said that he knew nothing of him; he had written to his last address, but had received no reply.

It was cold dull wintry weather, and the old man looked so solitary, that one or two tried to rally him, and even asked him to come and dine or spend the evening with them, to which he responded by his old harsh laugh, and putting on his worsted gloves, trudged home through the snow.

One morning he awoke early, almost before daylight had penetrated the dull rooms where he lived, and had a sudden fancy to walk into the church. It was already daylight in the streets, but the interior of St. Simon Swynherde was dim with mist and with the obscurity of the high windows. He could only just see the pillars and the organ, where his own name had been painted in gilt letters since the time that he had been churchwarden and helped to restore it. Even as he looked up at it, the notes of the Christmas hymn came trembling into the chill morning air, for the organist had come there to practise, and expected the parish school children to come in to sing at a morning service. To most people there might have been nothing in the place or its associations to evoke much gentle feeling; but as the tones of the organ swelled and the music grew louder, old Richard Dryce sat down in the corner of his own pew and leaned his head upon the book-board, with his hands clasped before his face. Not till the warm tears had trickled from between his fingers did he raise his head, and then it was to look round him to the cushion at the other end of the pew, for from some place near him he thought he had heard a sound that was out of all harmony with the organ, but not altogether apart from the associations of the Christmas hymn the wailing of a child. Another moment and he was bending over a bundle seemingly composed of a coarse blue cloak, but from which there presently came out a baby hand and, the covering once pulled aside, a little round rosy face in which a pair of large blue eyes were wide awake in utter astonishment. Who can tell what had been the thoughts busy in old Dryce’s mind? Was it prayer? Was it that yearning which finds no words of entreaty, but yet ardently and dumbly implores all vaguely that the crooked paths of former error may be made straight at last that the rough places of a mistaken course may become divinely plain? He could not tell; and yet in some way he accepted this child as a visible answer to a petition that he had meant to frame. When the organist and the sextoness came down presently, and with indignant virtue advised the removal of the child to the workhouse, he regarded their suggestion as little less than impious, and expressed his determination of taking the little one home with him.

His old housekeeper and the younger servants were not a little surprised to see the merchant come home with such a companion; but Mr. Dryce was master in his own house, and the little guest was fed. Then Doctor Banks was sent for, and he declared that it would be necessary to provide a nurse, while, as luck would have it, he had that very morning been sent for to see a casual applicant for relief at the Union workhouse a woman who had just lost a child. Temporarily she might do well enough, and Doctor Banks wanted to get home to dinner; so away went the housekeeper in a cab with a letter from the doctor, and in two hours came back bringing with her a pale pretty young woman whose name was Jane Harris, and who, her husband having gone abroad and left her with a child which she had just lost, was reduced to apply at the workhouse. She was so timid, and had at first such a scared look, that Mr. Dryce had much trouble to induce her to stay; but it was quite wonderful the way in which the child took to her, and so a room was got ready for them both, and she was comfortably settled, almost, as the housekeeper said, “as if she was a lady, though for the matter of that, Doctor Banks knew more about her than he said.” At any rate Doctor Banks said the next day, after he had had a little conversation with the new nurse, that she was thoroughly trustworthy, and that he himself had known her father, who once held a very respectable position in the city. So Mrs. Harris became an inmate at the dim old house, and her charge throve under her care.

He was a bonny boy, and every day his little baby ways became of so great interest to the lonely old man, that he was never happy after business hours until he had the little fellow in the room. He never stayed at his old tavern now for more than half an hour beyond the time it took him to eat his dinner, and even went so far as to tell two or three of his friends what he had done, and invite them home to see the child, in whom they being themselves fathers of families they could see nothing extraordinary, and wondered amongst themselves at old Dryce’s strange infatuation.

When the boy at last grew able to crawl about, and even to walk from chair to chair, he seemed to have so grown to the old man’s heart that Dryce became subject to a kind of transformation. His laugh grew more mellow, as though the violin had been laid near the fire, and played upon gently; a dozen old and forgotten picture-books were disinterred from some box, and toys strewed the floor of the dingy sitting-room. At about this time Mrs. Harris was for a week or more strangely agitated by a letter which was brought to her one morning, and came as she said from her husband, who had been for some time in Australia. Upon her recovery Mr. Dryce inquired a little into her husband’s circumstances, and hearing that he was endeavouring to establish an agency in Sydney, wrote a letter requesting him to make some inquiries about a house to which Dryce & Co. had made large consignments, but whose promised remittance had not duly arrived. The old man had other matters to occupy him, however, for with something like a resumption of his old vigour and his business habits he had called for his books, for he had had some serious losses lately, and began to think it necessary to give more personal attention to the current accounts. Still every day he had his little pet into the room to play about his knees, and indeed refused to part with him even when nurse Harris came to put him to bed, often making her stay and take some wine, or consulting her as to some future provisions, for her little charge, for whom she seemed to have even more affection than the old gentleman himself.

It was late one evening that he sat talking to her in this way, but still with a rather absent manner, for his heavy ledgers and cash-books lay beside him on the table. She would have taken the child away, but Mr. Dryce told her to let him remain, and at the same time asked her to step down into the counting-house, and if Mr. Jaggers had not left for the night, to ask him to come up.

Now Mr. Jaggers had so seldom been invited to come upstairs, that, although he of course knew of the adoption of the little foundling, he had never seen the nurse; but that was scarcely any reason for her stopping on her way downstairs and pressing her hand to her side with a sudden spasm of fear.

She got down at last, however, and opening the two doors which led to the passage, at the end of which was the private counting-house, stood there in the shadow and looked in.

Mr. Jaggers was busy at his desk tearing up papers, some of which already blazed upon the hearth. The desk itself was open, and by the light of the shaded lamp she could see that it contained a heavily bound box in which hung a bunch of keys. As she delivered Mr. Dryce’s message, still in the shadow of the door, he looked up with a scared face, and dropping the lid of the desk with a loud slam, peered into the darkness.

Mrs. Harris repeated her message, and returned swiftly up the stairs, nor stopped even to go in for the child, but shut herself into her own room. Somehow or other Mr. Jaggers felt a cold perspiration break out all over him, and yet he need scarcely have been cold, for he already had his greatcoat on, and there was a decent fire in the grate burning behind a guard. Still he shivered, and after taking the lamp and once more looking into the entry, gave a deep sigh of relief, and in a half-absent manner locked both box and desk and carefully placed the keys in a breast pocket. Leaving the lamp still burning, he went upstairs and found Mr. Dryce alone, sitting at the table with the books open before him. He looked up as his clerk entered. “Take a seat, Jaggers,” he said, “I shall want you for an hour or more, for there are several things here that require explanation.”

Mr. Jaggers turned pale, but he took off his coat and laid it along with his hat on the great horsehair sofa at the other end of the room. Then both he and his employer plunged into figures, till the chimes of a distant clock sounded nine. “We must finish this the day after to-morrow, Jaggers,” said Mr. Dryce. “I won’t keep you longer.”

Mr. Jaggers put on his coat and hat, and bade his employer good-night, and he had no sooner left the room than Mrs. Harris came in to fetch the little one, for, as she said, “it was already past his bedtime.”

Richard Dryce fell into his chair, and was as near having a fit as ever he had been in his life.

“Good heaven! Mrs. Harris you don’t mean to say you haven’t got the boy. He’s not here; run and see whether he has gone into Betsy’s room; she runs away with him sometimes.”

“Mamma!” said a sleepy little voice under the sofa, and Mr. Dryce and the nurse were both on their knees in a moment.

“The precious! why, if he hasn’t been asleep all the time!” said Mr. Dryce, kissing the warm rosy cheek; “take him off to bed directly, and bring him down to breakfast in the morning.”

Mrs. Harris only just escaped meeting Jaggers on the stairs, up which he was coming, followed by Betty with a flaring tallow candle, and looking carefully on every stair. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, with a scared look, as he opened the room door, “but have you seen my keys anywhere? I must have dropped them somewhere in the room, I think.”

“No,” replied Mr. Dryce, “I’ve seen nothing most extraordinary!” he said to himself, thinking of the child and forgetting Jaggers.

“It is, sir, very extraordinary,” said the clerk, groping on the floor and patting the carpet with his hands. “I know I had them when I came up here, and I can’t open my desk where I keep my money.”

“Oh! never mind, Jaggers,” said Mr. Dryce sleepily. “Here are a couple of sovereigns. If we find the keys, you can have them to-morrow; and if not, we will have a new lock. Come, good night! I’ll come down and bolt the office door after you.”

Jaggers entreated his employer not to take so much trouble, and delayed so long that the old gentleman began to grow a little impatient. At last he got rid of him by giving him permission to come early on the following morning, when, if his keys were not discovered by the servant in sweeping, he might pick the lock.

Mr. Dryce was in a brown study, sitting looking at the fire, and sipping a glass of hot negus, when Mrs. Harris knocked at the door.

“Excuse me, sir, but have you missed your keys?”

“Hang the keys!” said Mr. Dryce absently. “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Harris; sit down a moment. I was thinking what I could buy our little fellow for a present.”

“But these keys, sir? I took them out of the bosom of baby’s frock when I undressed him. How he got them I can’t tell.”

Mr. Dryce took the keys in his hand and looked at them mechanically; then he started and singled out one particular key, held it nearer the light, at the same time comparing it with one of a bunch which he took from his own pocket. He had turned stern and pale.

“I want you to come downstairs with me, Mrs. Harris,” he said: “these are the keys Mr. Jaggers has lost, and I’m afraid I shall want a policeman.”

First the door of the great iron safe let into the wall. Mr. Dryce knew that it was a cunningly-made lock, and thought that no key but his would open it. It opened easily with Jaggers’s key, however; and from the lower drawer was missing all the property which in those days were often kept in such places bills, gold, and notes to the value of four thousand five hundred pounds.

With feverish haste the old man unlocked the desk and the brass-bound box within it. The latter contained all the missing property, evidently placed there for immediate removal. In the desk were found bills, letters, and correspondence, a glance at which disclosed a long system of fraud and peculation. Above all, amongst the loose papers were the letters that Robert sent to his father, and those which had been written by himself in repentance of the harsh parting which he had brought about with his lost son.

While they were both looking with mute astonishment at these evidences of Jaggers’s villany, there came a low knocking at the door, and two men entered, one of them a broad, brown-bearded man in a half seafaring dress, the other a policeman.

“A clerk of yours, named Jaggers,” said the latter. “I want to know whether he has robbed you, or if you have reason to suspect him. This party has given him in custody on another charge.”

There was a loud scream, and Mrs. Harris fell into the arms of the stranger, who had taken her aside to whisper to her.

“She is my wife,” said he to Mr. Dryce. “I am the person to whom you wrote, and I have brought the remittance with me from Australia.”

They all went upstairs together, except the policeman, whose question was answered by a recital of the events of the night, and the present of a sovereign.

“Bring down the boy, and let me look at his dear little face,” said old Dryce, when they were sitting round the fire.

The child was brought down tenderly, and still asleep.

“God bless him!” said the bearded stranger. “He’s not like either of us, Aggy.”

“Like either of you?” said Mr. Dryce, surprised. “How should he be like your husband, Mrs. Harris?”

“Don’t you know me, sir,” said the stranger, taking Mr. Dryce’s hand and sitting in the firelight. “My name is Robert Dryce, and this is my child, whose mother left it to the mercy of Heaven, and found that it had reached its natural home. Forgive us, sir, for our child’s sake.”

Old Dryce was a shrewd man, but it took an hour to make him understand it all; events had come about so strangely.

“Well,” said Robert at last, “I’m glad you were in time to save the money.”

“Confound the money!” ejaculated the old man; “at least, too much of it,” he added, correcting himself. “This baby’s hand has unlocked more treasures for me than all the Bank of England could count on a summer’s day.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t like to live in London always,” said Kate Bell, whose father was one of the large mill-owners at Barton. “I’ve been up twice with papa, you know; but we lived in a great square where we could hear the noise of the cabs all night, and of the carts and wagons as soon as daylight came. And then there are such crowds of people in the streets; and if you walk you are pushed about so, and if you ride you can’t see anything except from an open carriage. Except the theatre, where I went twice, and the Zoological Gardens and the Crystal Palace, and Hyde Park, where everybody goes before dinner, there’s nothing to care for.”

“Nothing to care for!” exclaimed Annie Bowers; “why, the streets and the old historical buildings Westminster Abbey, the Picture Galleries, the great solemn churches, with monuments of poets and warriors, and the constant life and movement and change, must be grand, if one only could stay long enough to get over the feeling that you are only sight-seeing. To be a part of it all, and to be able to go about quietly and live in it, looking and thinking and making one’s own pictures and one’s own romances of it, would be delightful for six months in the year. I often think it would be grand to spend a summer day in the middle of one of the bridges Westminster or London Bridge and watch the boats on the river and the tide of people coming and going, and see the clouds and the sunshine change the colour of the stream and the outlines of the great buildings, and then to go back just at dark and see the same scene by moonlight, with everything transformed and solemn, and listen to the rush of the tide and watch the lights twinkling on wharves and on board boats and barges, and the moon on the great lovely buildings of Westminster, and the dome of St. Paul’s in the distance: that is what I should like to do.”

“I used to think very much as you do, Annie, when I was last in London,” said Miss Grantley; “but then I had very little opportunity of going to theatres or other amusements, for I had no one to take me except in a family party, and had to make the most of the pleasure that is to be found in the wonderful aspects of the great city itself. Of course it is only possible for a poor unprotected creature to see a part of the greatest capital in the world; and so when I went to explore the bridges or any other neighbourhood after dusk I took an escort, and one who knew London so well that he was able to say where I ought and where I ought not to go.”

“A policeman, was it, Miss Grantley?” said Kate Bell.

“Oh, dear! no. Policemen have no time to go out as escorts to young or middle-aged ladies,” said our governess laughing. “My cavalier was a boy who worked at a printing-office. His mother was a very respectable woman who lived in a tidy house in a very quiet street where she let two furnished rooms, and I was her tenant while I was studying to pass two examinations. I had been staying with old friends of my dear father, for they did not desert me altogether though I was only a governess; indeed, they gave me too large a share of the amusements and sight-seeing which take up so much time, so that I was obliged to bid them good-bye for a good while, and restrict my visits to Sundays or one evening a week. I think my landlady, who was a widow, had been their cook; but at all events she was a good motherly woman, and her boy of fourteen was always ready for an excursion when he came home from work.

“At first I was obliged to repress his sense of being a sort of champion; and once when a bigger and very dirty boy, who had a dog in a string, splashed my dress with mud and nearly threw me down, I had to go home again because my young friend gave him battle, and after fighting for several minutes came out of the fray with his collar so rumpled, his best cap so crushed, and his face so smirched that it was a dearly-bought victory. But he was an excellent boy and an apt pupil, for I used to give him easy lessons in French and mathematics sometimes, so that when I left he was able to attend an advanced class at an evening college in the city. He had the sentiment of a gentleman too, though he was a printer’s boy and was always called Bob. He never talked to me unless I spoke to him first or he had to give me some direction or tell me which way we were going; and in the great thoroughfares he would walk either just in front or at a little distance, so that no one would have known we were companions. I used to remonstrate with him sometimes, for it made me feel that I was selfish and discourteous to have him to guide or follow me without acknowledgment; but he always replied that people couldn’t talk in the noise of the streets, and that what I came out for was ’to see London or to look at shop-windows, or to see how places looked after dark, or to get a walk and some fresh air on London or Blackfriars’ Bridge, and to be able to fancy all manner of things, and yet to have somebody that knew all about London to keep me from being run over or pick-pocketed or interfered with by anybody.’

“Never had lady a more devoted squire; and I really believe he used to read up the history and anecdotes of some of the churches and public buildings, that he might be able to have something to say when I insisted on talking to him as we strolled quietly along in the less-crowded thoroughfares especially those around St. Paul’s and the Royal Exchange, where the city is nearly deserted after the hours of business.”

“Well, Miss Grantley, and is it about this very agreeable boy that you are going to tell us a story?” asked Sarah Jorring, who was often rather abrupt and impertinent.

For a moment a shaft of light seemed to dart from those expressive eyes upon the questioner, but the instantaneous gleam of surprise and annoyance passed into a smile.

“I would never willingly forget or be ashamed to speak of true service and real courtesy,” she said. “I should we most of us would feel some satisfaction in acknowledging the politeness shown to us by a duke or an earl, even though to be scrupulously courteous should be regarded as duties and customs belonging to their station. To have received true and delicate consideration from a printer’s boy is therefore more remarkable, and to speak of it with grateful recollection is only just. My own want of courtesy, however, led me to forget that we seldom feel much enthusiasm about the attentions that are bestowed on other people.”

We were all silent for a moment, for there was a rebuke even in the gentle tone in which the words were uttered; but presently Annie Bowers said:

“Did you ever know an actor, Miss Grantley?”

“Well, I cannot say I never met an actor,” replied our governess; “and yet it was not in London, but at the village near which I lived when I was at home with my dear father, whose house and grounds were not far off, and whose pew in the church had belonged to his family from time immemorial.”

“Oh! do let us hear something about that, then,” we said.

“Well,” replied our governess, “that shall be the story for to-morrow evening the story of a stranger from London who visited our village.”