surprise, but said nothing.

"When did you come to town?" he asked. "I thought you were quite a country young lady, and never ventured into the giddy world of London."

"I was not very well," replied Edith, "and my aunt invited me to stop with her a few weeks. This is my aunt, Mrs. Hetherington; and this gentleman is my cousin Walter." Here Edith went somewhat nervously through the ceremony of introduction. She added, with a slight flush, "My cousin insisted on bringing us here to-night. I did not wish to come."

"Why not?" demanded Haldane, noticing her uneasiness.

"Because I did not think it right; and I have been thinking all the evening what the vicar will say when I tell him I have been to such a place."

Here the old lady shook her head ominously, and gave a slight groan.

"Is the place so terrible," asked Haldane, smiling, "now you have seen it?"

"No, it is very pretty; and of course the singing is beautiful. But Mr. Santley does not approve of the theatre, and I am sorry I came."

"Nonsense, Edith," said young Hetherington, with a laugh. "You know you wanted to see the 'Traviata,' The fact is," he continued, turning to Haldane, "my mother and my cousin are both terribly old-fashioned. My mother here is Scotch, and believes in the kirk, the whole kirk, and nothing but the kirk; and as for Edith, she is entirely, as they say in Scotland, under the minister's 'thoomb.' I thought they would have enjoyed themselves, but they have been doing penance all the evening."

Without paying attention to her cousin's remarks, Edith was looking thoughtfully at Haldane.

"When do you return to Omberley?" she asked.

"I am not sure—in a fortnight, at the latest. I am going on to France."

"And Mrs. Haldane will remain all that time alone?"

"Of course," he replied. "Oh, she will not miss me. She has her household duties, her parish, her garden—to say nothing of her clergyman. And you, do you stay long in London?"

"I am not sure; I think not. I am tired of it already."

Again that weary, wistful look, which sat so strangely on the young, almost childish face. She sighed, and gazed sadly around the crowded house. A minute later, Haldane took his leave, and rejoined his friend in the stalls. Looking up at the end of the next act, he saw that the box was empty.

The women had yielded to their consciences, and departed before the end of the performance.

That night, when Haldane went home to Chelsea, he found a letter from his wife. It was a long letter, but contained no news whatever, being chiefly occupied with self-reproaches that the writer had not accompanied her husband in his pilgrimage. This struck Haldane as rather peculiar, as in former communications Ellen had expressed no such dissatisfaction; but he was by nature and of set habit unsuspicious, and he set it down to some momentary ennui. The letter contained no mention whatever of Mr. Santley, but in the postscript, where ladies often put the most interesting part of their correspondence, there was a reference to the Spanish valet, Baptisto.

"As I told you," wrote Ellen, "Baptisto seems in excellent health, though he is mysterious and unpleasant as usual. He comes and goes like a ghost, but if he made you believe that he was ill, he was imposing upon you. I do so wish you had taken him with you."

Haldane folded up the letter with a smile.

"Poor Baptisto!" he thought, "I suppose it is as I suspected, and the little widow at the lodge is at the bottom of it all."

After a few days' sojourn at Chelsea, during which time he was much interested in certain spiritualistic investigations which were just then being conducted by the London savants, to the manifest confusion of the spirits and indignation of true believers, Haldane went to Paris, where he read his paper before the French Society to which he belonged. There we shall leave him for a little time, returning to the company of Miss Dove, with whom we have more immediate concern.

Mother and son lived in a pleasant house overlooking Clapham Common, a district famous for its religious edification, its young ladies' seminaries, and its dissenting chapels. Mrs. Hethering-ton was the wealthy widow of a Glasgow merchant, long settled in London, and she set her face rigidly against modern thought, ecclesiastical vestments, and cooking on the sabbath. Curiously enough, her son Walter, who inherited a handsome competence, was a painter, and followed his heathen occupation with much talent, and more youthful enthusiasm. His landscapes, chiefly of Highland scenes, had been exhibited in the Royal Scottish Academy. His mother, whose highest ideas of art were founded on a superficial acquaintance with the Scripture pieces of Noel Paton, and an occasional contemplation of biblical masterpieces in the Doré Gallery, would have preferred to have seen him following in his fathers footsteps, and even entering the true kirk as a preacher; but his sympathies were pagan, and a gloomy childish experience had not fitted him with the requisite enthusiasm for John Calvin and the sabbath.

Walter Hetherington was a fine fresh young fellow of three and twenty, and belonged to the clever set of Scotch painters, headed by Messrs. Pettie, Richardson, and Peter Graham. He was "cannie" painstaking, and rather sceptical, and, putting aside his art, which he really loved, he felt true enthusiasm for only one thing in the world—his cousin Edith, whom he hoped and longed to make his wife.

As a very young girl, Edith had seemed rather attached to him; but of late years, during which they saw each other only at long intervals, she seemed colder and colder to his advances. He noticed her indifference, and set it down somewhat angrily to girlish fanaticism, for he had little or no suspicion whatever that another man's image might be filling her thoughts. Once or twice, it is true, when she sounded the praises of her Omberley pastor, his zeal, his goodness, his beauty of discourse, he asked himself if he could possibly have a rival there; but knowing something of the relinquent fancies of young vestals, he rejected the idea. To tell the truth, he rather pitied the Rev. Mr. Santley, whom he had never seen, as a hardheaded, dogmatic, elderly creature of the type greatly approved by his mother, and abundant even in Clapham. He had no idea of an Adonis in a clerical frock coat, with a beautiful profile, white hands, and a voice gentle and low—the latter an excellent thing in woman, but a dangerous thing in an unmarried preacher of the Word.

CHAPTER XVII. WALTER HETHERINGTON.

When the party got home from the opera, it was only half-past ten. They sat down to a frugal supper in the dining-room.

"I am sorry you did not wait till the last act," said the young man, after an awkward silence. "Patti's death scene is magnificent."

"I'm thinking we heard enough," his mother replied. "I never cared much for play-acting, and I see little sense in screeching about in a foreign tongue. I'd rather have half an hour of the Reverend Mr. Mactavish's discourses than a night of fooling like yon."

"What do you say, Edith? I'm sure the music was very pretty."

"Yes, it was beautiful; but not knowing much of Italian, I could not gather what it was all about."

"It is an operatic version of a story of the younger Dumas," explained Walter, with an uncomfortable sense of treading on dangerous ground. "The story is that of a beautiful woman who has lived an evil life, and is reformed through her affection for a young Frenchman. His friends think he is degrading himself by offering to marry her, and to cure him she pretends to be false and wicked. In the end, she dies in his arms, broken-hearted. It is a very touching subject, I think, though some people consider it immoral."

Here the matron broke in