gradual an opening of the door that he is himself only visible to the visitor by instalments.

"You can come in, Mr. Gilly," he says, in a patronizing tone, on discovering him still to retain the perpendicular, and he shuts the door and stalks noisily before him into the parlour. "Dick rather expected you to-day, -he'll be in directly-but perhaps you're hungry, and would like a slice of beef? No offence, you know-but I don't 'spose you get roast beef every day; no more do we."

But "Mr. Gilly," who is known not to be ashamed of his poverty, "has lunched."

"You'll have something to drink, then," says Anak, generously, and rattling the money in his pocket (all this I hear subsequently). "I got my wages at the warehouse last night, you know; and there's a pub. round the corner."

But Mr. Gilly is understood to say he is not thirsty.

"Ah! had too much last night, perhaps," says Anak. (There is nothing like knowing another man has a vice that you yourself have not, for breeding a fine contempt of him.) "When I've done dinner I'll fetch you some soda water-though I will say this for you, that you don't look like a person who gets tight every night-when he can afford the luxury."

Mr. Gilly here bursts out into a laugh that re-assures Anak, who is beginning to think that there is considerably more starch in Gilly's disposition and linen than he should have expected from my description of him.

"Ha! ha! ha!" goes Anak, "how we have roared, to be sure, over your lighting yourself to bed with the cheese, and shutting up the cupboard with the lighted candle inside it, where Dick found it when he came home!"

"Ha! ha! ha!" goes Mr. Gilly, convulsed with mirth.

"And the time when a student came to borrow a shilling of you, and you were as hard up as he was, and had popped everything but what you stood up in, so you took out your false teeth and got five shillings on the gold setting every penny of which you gave him."

Mr. Gilly is understood to repudiate the noble deed of charity ascribed to him.

"You must have looked awfully queer without 'em," says Anak, "being your four front ones-though 'pon my word they look so real that I should never have known they were false. Well, I must go and finish my dinner. Dick'll be in directly. Here's an album if you'd like to look at it."

Mr. Gilly opens it, and exclaims,—

"Ah!-Hetty?"

"Miss Hetty, if you please," says Anak,

from the door with great hauteur.

"My

sisters are not used to being called by their Christian names out of their own family."

And his manner is still majestic when he rejoins us.

I don't know what possesses Hetty, who has been changing colour ever since Anak left the room, to jump up as he re-enters it, as if about to ask a question; but never heeding her, he goes straight to his dinner, and she sits down again.

"I wish Gilly wouldn't come at such awkward times," he says, in a grumbling voice; "especially if he isn't hungry-and he won't have anything to drink either. He's not a bit like what you sketched him, Dick-he's as decent looking as you are-and decenter.”

"He must have come into a fortune since yesterday, then-for he was worse than ever when I saw him at hospital.'

"He doesn't know his manners towards ladies," says Anak, scowling; "he had the impudence to call Hetty, Hetty, so I took him down a peg or two."

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Why, Gilly!" I say, entering the parlour a minute later, stopping short, however, as I discover the man who occupies it to be no

66

Gilly," but an utter stranger.

"I am Ullathorne," he says, advancing, "and you are Sieviking?"

As we grip hands, the feeling that prevails with me is less one of surprise than of wonder. How came such a man as this to fall in love with our Hetty? For, though he is young, not more than half-a-dozen years my senior, there is that in his face which marks him out from the ordinary men of his class; not only is there as much sense as birth in his face, but he looks as if he took life in earnest, and could, on occasion, think.

VOL. II.

6