I do not know whether she will live as long as her mother, who seems to
have taken a fresh lease of years from her single act of self-sacrifice.
I cannot say whether Mrs. Bentley feels herself deceived and defrauded
by her daughter's recovery; but I have made my wife observe that it
would be just like life if she bore the young couple a sort of grudge
for unwittingly outwitting her. Certainly, on the day we lately spent
with them all at Gormanville, she seemed, in the slight attack of asthma
from which she suffered, to come as heavily and exactingly upon both as
she used to come upon her daughter alone. But I was glad to see that
Glendenning eagerly bore the greater part of the common burden. He grows
stouter and stouter, and will soon be the figure of a bishop.




THE PURSUIT OF THE PIANO.




I.

Hamilton Gaites sat breakfasting by the window of a restaurant looking
out on Park Square, in Boston, at a table which he had chosen after
rejecting one on the Boylston Street side of the place because it was
too noisy, and another in the little open space, among evergreens in
tubs, between the front and rear, because it was too chilly. The wind
was east, but at his Park Square window it tempered the summer morning
air without being a draught; and he poured out his coffee with a content