heedlessness to her loss only made her solitude seem more acute; and her sister would look after them, and perform those duties which would have brought her face to face with people.

But gradually in course of time life and its responsibilities became sweeter to her, dulling her pain as the days went on; but the shock produced on her mind by her husband's dying request did not fade so quickly.

It was very early in her widowhood that one day, when she was in the little parlour with her sister, she had seen the jar her husband had referred to.

"Annie," she said, "do take that thing away; in the cupboard in my room will do."

For it was there as a record of her husband's inexplicable request, and in her eyes was an abhorrence. And her sister had taken it, being ignorant of its fault and somewhat wondering. So in mournful monotony the months rolled by, until spring returned to the sodden fields and warmed them into life. And Mary had become calmer and more reconciled, though her old love and craving for her husband had not ceased. Even that dimly expressed consciousness of the blue jar and its relation to her, which was always lying latent in her mind, seemed as time went on to grow weaker. Certain it is, that one day she had opened the cupboard where it was and had looked at it, and allowed her mind to be flooded with the memory of the curious compact she had made with her husband; and still later on she had deliberately taken it down and dusted it, remembering how John had loved it, and for the time thinking but little of his last request and the influence it might have on her future. For winter had sped its chilly course,

and her husband had been dead now eight months, and Henry Biddulph was forgotten. Spring that year had opened warm and bright, remaining so. The brown and purple woods had reddened before the bursting leaf, which in its turn had given way to fairy and to darkening greens. The copses where the woodmen had been thinning in the winter had sheltered the primroses and anemones, and they had come and gone, and now in this engendering month of May the woods were all azure, carpeted with hyacinths and blue-bells, and ground and sky 'were mysterious in that great awakening which God does give us year by year. Though tending by the contrast of its beauty to strengthen the shadow through which she was passing, Mary accepted it with the natural love of a country woman, and spent a great part of the day, for the inn was quite empty, in the woods and tending the small garden at the back of the house. On one of these occasions Annie had stayed behind, and while mending a torn curtain in her sister's room she suddenly remembered that the blue jar was still shut up in the cupboard. Thinking it was good for Mary, she had persistently put all the winter things back as they were before John's death, whenever she got the chance; and as Mary had generally accepted their return passively, Annie on this occasion, despite its emphatic removal in the first instance, felt no hesitation in taking the jar out and going down-stairs with it to the parlour, yet wondering with a half smile whether her sister would notice it or not. As she entered the room she saw through the window a dog-cart coming up the hill to the house, and in it a man whom she knew very well by sight.

Giving a jump of excitement, and hastily putting the jar on the dresser, she fled into the garden to tell Mary.

"There's Henry Biddulph coming up the hill in a dog-cart," she panted.

Mary stopped short, for the announcement stunned her. Then pulling herself together and dismissing her first inclination to refuse to see him, she quickened her pace towards the house, feeling very uncomfortable and nervous.

Annie," she said, "he'll go to the stable first, so come and help me put the parlour straight." And she walked on in front of her and went to the window. Looking out, she was just in time to see the dog-cart turning into the yard, and the driver of it was a middleaged man, whose bulk and florid face told her it was Henry Biddulph. The sight of him brought back to her all her pain, and intensified all her embarrassed feelings towards him. Sharply she recalled, as she stood there looking at him, her husband's words, and it almost seemed as if he knew her secret.

Feeling hot and miserable, she turned from the window, and her eye fell on the blue jar. The unaccustomed sight of it startled her, and all her pent-up feelings burst out.

"Who brought it down, Annie?" she exclaimed passionately. "It's too bad. I've enough to bear without that."

Annie, who was arranging the chairs and books in the orthodox manner round the room, looked up in a frightened manner and gasped.

"I thought" she began.

"Oh, never mind what you thought," interrupted Mary, excitedly; "take it away at once before he comes. You don't know

what you are doing." And not until she saw Annie hurry out of the room with the jar did she calm down, and a minute or two after, Henry Biddulph, the man whom her husband wanted her to marry, and who had been her nightmare for the last eight months, strolled into the room, drawing off his gloves as he did so.

As he stood in the doorway Mary fancied he was taller and bulkier than ever, and her thoughts, as is often the case in sudden emotion, took refuge in some unconnected detail, and she found herself wondering at the size of his feet and the thickness of the soles of his boots. Then as his good-natured face, tempered by an awful solemnity assumed on this visit of condolence, beamed down on her, she felt, almost with a sense of irritation, how glad she would have been to see him under other circumstances. And Henry Biddulph, who had steeled himself for this visit, felt somewhat the same as he took the chair she offered him and gave vent to murmured expressions of sympathy with the air of a funeral mute. After which he put his hat on the table, and then thinking it looked unseemly in that position, he stored it away under his chair, from which soon after, in a moment of restless shyness, he kicked it, so that it rolled into the middle of the room, where it lay for the rest of the interview. After these preliminaries, he remarked in an expressionless voice, as if he were delivering a message

"Mrs Tilbury, I was sorry-I may say I was wretched-that I could not be at poor John's funeral. He was my oldest friend for more than twenty years." Here he sighed so loudly that he woke up a large blue-bottle fly, which buzzed round the room with

But," he

protesting energy. went on, "I was away in America on business-corn-and I wrote to you but got no answer," and he tried to throw reproach into his voice.

"No; I got none," said Mary, feeling wretchedly nervous, and wondering how to get him away from the subject. "You must be glad to get back to England. Did you go about with a bowie-knife and a revolver? America is so uncivilised you've always to go about armed, haven't you?" But the laugh which followed had little joy in it.

Henry looked somewhat scandalised. Was his old friend's

wife heartless?

"it's

"Well," he answered, nearly as bad as that. It's a young country. But," relapsing into the mutelike expression of voice, tell me, did John leave me any message, poor fellow? I am sure he thought of me."

Mary looked up in a frightened way, and she felt she could stand it but a very little longer.

"N'-no,-yes," and the words came through a haze of restrained tears. "He was very ill-at the last he did not know what he was saying."

"Ah, yes! of course, of course, only natural," said Henry, soothingly. And then the conversation died away, and for some moments there was silence in the room, while Annie's voice could be heard excitedly arguing with some one at the backdoor. But there was something on Henry's mind that he felt he must say, and then he would go. Taking out a notebook and pretending to inspect its leaves, he murmured—

"Poor John, of course not. But," and he leant forward with a confiding air towards Mary, "I've often worried if he was

angry with me. It's been on my mind. Yer know, I think he was angry with me that Christmas?" He stopped, for something in Mary's manner disconcerted him. Then he took courage and went on.

"I would not have hurt him for the world. Only my chafHis words stopped and his ideas fled.

What had he said? What was wrong? For Mrs Tilbury had become very white, and the next minute had put her handkerchief to her eyes, and, murmuring something unintelligible, had hastily left the room.

For fully ten minutes Henry Biddulph sat where he had been left, feeling thoroughly staggered, and more like a whipt hound than an afternoon caller has any right to do. He waited on, half hoping she might return, and, in view of the further embarrassment it might involve, half dreading she would do so. It was all so disappointing. He blew his nose with a large red handkerchief, and thought what a muddle he had made of the visit.

Yet he could

why she had seemed so unand at last he

not understand changed so and friendly to him, picked up his hat and left the room, telling himself he had been treated rather badly, and that it was the last time he would try and console disconsolate widows, whether he was their oldest friend or not; and so, looking neither to the left nor right of him, he found his way to the stables, and climbing heavily into the dog - cart, went sadly back down the hill he had so lately climbed. And Mary watched him from her window, and as he went out of sight, overcome by mortification and vexation, she burst into tears.

Now that he was gone, she realised how absurdly sensitive she had become by nursing a self-conscious

ness which had ended in making her ridiculous in her own sight and probably in his. And at the thought of this she dried her eyes and became scarlet and hot with shame by a new terror, that he must have seen through her constraint and silly flight, and with a man's natural vanity would have made a pretty near guess at its cause. Perhaps she thought, hoteyed with horror, he even knew the cause men were so odd, her husband might have mentioned his curious whim to him. And so in a pitiful state of mortification she spent the evening, sometimes blaming him, sometimes herself. However, when next morning came, she did the only thing which was left to her. She wrote him a little note saying how sorry she had been to leave him so suddenly, but she had felt overcome.

With the despatch of this she came to the quiet determination to receive him when he next came as she used in John's time, as an old friend without any constraint. And the end of it all was that Biddulph some weeks after came again up the hill, with doubts in his heart as to his reception, and was met with a warmth of manner which pleased, but left him more puzzled than ever at the ways of women, and widows especially.

he would tell himself, and he owed it to poor John to take care of her. For there is always a certain satisfaction in looking after a pretty woman, and telling yourself that there is not a touch of sentiment in the feeling. For Biddulph had convinced himself of this, and told himself a dozen times a-day that it was only so.

Mary on these visits received him in varying moods, and used to make a point of mentioning something connected with John. It was like a prayer uttered before going into battle.

But gradually she got very used to his visits, and found herself looking forward to them; for life was monotonous, and even Biddulph's heavy facetiousness was a relief. The old emotions which had made her lose her head when first he called were dormant, but only dormant. Even the jar had lost its import, and was now always on her dressing-table. Mary even had thought of taking it downstairs, but lacked the courage. But Annie had come into her bedroom one day, and yielding to a sudden impulse, had taken up the jar and looked at it, saying, "Let's put it in the parlour. It's lost up here."

Then she remembered with a heightening of colour her last defeat in this direction; but, somewhat to her surprise, Mary said nothing but only nodded, and in triumph the blue jar was carried down and put on the old Jacobean dresser in the parlour which John had loved

About this time a long course of self-deceit came to a climax with Henry Biddulph, resulting in mental perturbations and indecision to which he was little accustomed, and which was wearing his "too, too solid flesh" away with worry.

He had to decide one way or another what was honestly his position to Mary Tilbury. He had woke up one morning and realised suddenly, as he stared at his towel-horse, that he was a fraud, and he ought at once to acknowledge that his feelings had drifted into quite another channel since he had begun to set himself a course of dutiful attentions to his old friend's widow.

And as Henry Biddulph was an honest man and given to making up his mind suddenly, he sat down to breakfast with the firm determination that he would put matters to the test and settle it one way or another. Then he worked himself almost into a brain-fever thinking how he was to do it, and finally drove off with a new hat and gloves, his best whip, and a huge carnation of brilliant hue in his coat.

Mary was in the garden when he arrived, but came in soon after. Her hair was disarranged, and she was looking very pretty, dressed in pink cotton, and when she saw Biddulph a woman's intuition told her that her trial had come. Almost unconsciously she sat down facing the jar. It seemed to give her help.

Now that Biddulph had come, all his courage had fled, and he talked about everything except what he had come for, casting about how to begin.

At last his wits and his courage came to his rescue, and with that solemnity of manner which shyness always imparted to him he said

"Mrs Tilbury, don't you find it very dull here?"

"Dull? not at all," was the prompt reply, and then the voice fell,-"though things are different now."

"I find living alone very dull," said Henry, stolidly.

"You? Why, you've lived alone for-well, all your life."

"Yes; but I can't do it much longer. I suppose I shall have to marry."

Suppose!" cried Mary, ironically; "you must not sacrifice yourself. There are other ways out of the difficulty-you might live with your sister."

"I once thought," said Biddulph, pursuing the even tenor of his remarks, for he was determined now to say his say, and she should not laugh him out of it— "I once thought you might find it dull also. What is life alone?"

The question seemed to open a large field of speculation, and Mary stared hard at the table-cloth, her heart beating a little faster than she liked.

"And if I am dull and think of marriage, and you are dull, why should not you think of it also? I am sure, if you would have married me, I could have made you happy," he went on, and his words were like the man, very simple. "I'd stand by you and love you."

Mary winced and the colour left her face, for he had unwittingly used the same words as John had done when speaking of him.

She looked up at him, and her glance took in the blue jar. It seemed to be watching her and waiting for her answer.

"You are very good," she said, tremulously, "to think of me; but there are reasons why I could not marry you."

"Sure?" "Yes."

"Perhaps it is too soon? But John would not have minded, I'm sure." He spoke almost as if to himself. It seemed quite natural to refer to her dead husband. They had all been great friends, and he knew he was doing nothing un