has upset all that feeling, and--'

'I can soon tell you the meaning of my extraordinary performance,'
Ethelberta broke in quickly, and with a little trepidation. 'My mother-
in-law, Lady Petherwin, is dead; and she has left me nothing but her
house and furniture in London--more than I deserve, but less than she had
distinctly led me to expect; and so I am somewhat in a corner.'

'It is always so.'

'Not always, I think. But this is how it happened. Lady Petherwin was
very capricious; when she was not foolishly kind she was unjustly harsh.
A great many are like it, never thinking what a good thing it would be,
instead of going on tacking from side to side between favour and cruelty,
to keep to a mean line of common justice. And so we quarrelled, and she,
being absolute mistress of all her wealth, destroyed her will that was in
my favour, and made another, leaving me nothing but the fag-end of the
lease of the town-house and the furniture in it. Then, when we were
abroad, she turned to me again, forgave everything, and, becoming ill
afterwards, wrote a letter to the brother, to whom she had left the bulk
of her property, stating that I was to have twenty-thousand of the one-
hundred-thousand pounds she had bequeathed to him--as in the original
will--doing this by letter in case anything should happen to her before a
new will could be considered, drawn, and signed, and trusting to his
honour quite that he would obey her expressed wish should she die abroad.
Well, she did die, in the full persuasion that I was provided for; but
her brother (as I secretly expected all the time) refused to be morally
bound by a document which had no legal value, and the result is that he
has everything, except, of course, the furniture and the lease. It would
have been enough to break the heart of a person who had calculated upon