PART II.

HE "every day" on which Mr. Roy had

THE

reckoned for seeing his friend, or whatsoever else he considered Miss Williams to be, proved a failure. Her youngest pupil fell ill, and she was kept beside him, and away from the school-room, until the doctor could decide whether the illness was infectious or not. It turned out to be very trifling-a most trivial thing altogether, yet weighted with a pain most difficult to bear, a sense of fatality that almost overwhelmed one person at least. What the other felt, she did not know. He came daily as usual; she watched him come and go, and sometimes he turned and they exchanged a greeting from the window. But beyond that she had to take all passively. What could she, only a woman, do or say or plan? Nothing. Women's business is to sit down and endure.

She had counted these days-Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday—as if they had been years. And now they were all gone; had fled like minutes-fled emptily away. A few fragmentary facts she had had to feed on, communicated by the boys in their rough talk.

"Mr. Roy was rather cross to-day."

"Not cross, Dick—only dull.”

"Mr. Roy asked why David did not come in to lessons, and said he hoped he would be better by Saturday."

"Mr. Roy said good-bye to us all, and gave us each something to remember him by when he was out in India. Did Miss Williams know he was going out to India? Oh, how jolly!"

"Yes, and he sails next week, and the name of his ship is the Queen of the South, and he goes by Liverpool instead of Southampton, because it costs less; and he leaves St. Andrews on Monday morning."

"Are you sure he said Monday morning?" For that was Saturday night.

"Certain, because he has to get his outfit still. Oh, what fun it must be!"

And the boys went on, greatly excited, repeating everything Mr. Roy had told them-for he had made them fond of him, even in those few months-expatiating with delight on his future career, as a merchant or something, they did not quite know what; but no doubt it would be far nicer and more amusing than stopping at home and grinding for ever over horrid books. Didn't Miss Williams think so?

Miss Williams only smiled. She knew how all his life he had loved "those horrid books," preferring them to pleasure, recreation, almost to daily bread; how he had lived on the hope that one day he-born only a farmer's sonmight do something, write something. "I also am of Arcadia." He might have done it or not -the genius may or may not have been there; but the ambition certainly was. Could he have thrown it all aside? And why?

Not for mere love of money; she knew him too well for that. He was a thorough book

worm, simple in all his tastes and habitssimple almost to penuriousness; but it was a penuriousness born of hard fortunes, and he never allowed it to affect anybody but himself. Still, there was no doubt he did not care for money, or luxury, or worldly position—any of the things that lesser men count large enough to work and struggle and die for. To give up the pursuits he loved, deliberately to choose others, to change his whole life thus, and expatriate himself, as it were, for years - perhaps for always-why did he do it, or for whom?

Was it for a woman? Was it for her? If ever, in those long, empty days and wakeful nights, this last thought entered Fortune's mind, she stifled it as something which, once to have fully believed, and then disbelieved, would have killed her.

That she should have done the like for himthat or anything else, involving any amount of heroism or self-sacrifice-well, it was natural, right; but that he should do it for her? That he should change his whole purpose of life that

he might be able to marry quickly, to shelter in his bosom a poor girl who was not able to fight the world as a man could, the thing-not so very impossible, after all—seemed to her almost incredible! And yet (I am telling a mere lovestory, remember-a foolish, innocent love-story, without apologizing for either the folly or the innocence) sometimes she was so far "left to herself," as the Scotch say, that she did believe it. In the still twilights, in the wakeful nights, in the one solitary half-hour of intense relief, when, all her boys being safe in bed, she rushed out into the garden under the silent stars to sob, to moan, to speak out loud words which nobody could possibly hear.

"He is going away, and I shall never see him again. And I love him so love him better than anything in all this help it he couldn't help it. hard!"

world. I couldn't

But oh, it's hard

And then, altogether breaking down, she would begin to cry like a child. She missed him so, even this week, after having for weeks