unresistingly, almost unconsciously, into new destinies. Hilary, for
the first time, began to doubt of theirs. Anxious as she had been to
go to London, and wise as the proceeding appeared, now that the die
was cast and the cable cut, the old simple, peaceful life at Stowbury
grew strangely dear.

"I wonder if we shall ever go back again, or what is to happen to us
before we do go back," she thought, and turned, with a half defined
fear, toward her eldest sister, who looked so old and fragile beside
that sturdy, healthful servant girl. "Elizabeth!" Elizabeth, rubbing
Miss Leaf's feet, started at the unwonted sharpness of Miss Hilary's
tone.

"There; I'll do that for my sister. Go and look out of the window at
London."

For the great smoky cloud which began to rise in the rainy horizon
was indeed London. Soon through the thickening nebula of houses they
converged to what was then the nucleus of all railway traveling, the
Euston Terminus, and were hustled on to the platform, and jostled
helplessly to and fro these poor country ladies! Anxiously they
scanned the crowd of strange faces for the one only face they knew in
the great metropolis--which did not appear.

"It is very strange; very wrong of Ascott. Hilary, you surely told
him the hour correctly. For once, at least, he might have been in
time"

So chafed Miss Selina, while Elizabeth, who by some miraculous effort
of intuitive genius, had succeeded in collecting the luggage, was now